MOLECULAR BIOLOGY REPORTS

Drug resistance is a significant challenge of daily oncology practice. Docetaxel and gossypol both have antitumoral activity in hormone-refractory prostate cancer (HRPC). Our results revealed that docetaxel and gossypol were synergistically cytotoxic and apoptotic in PC-3 cells in a dose- and time-dependent manner. We further investigated the expression profiles of genes involved in drug resistance and metabolism with a Human Cancer Drug Resistance and Metabolism PCR Array(A (R)) (SuperArray). Six of the 84 genes that are known to regulate drug resistance, metabolism, cell cycle, DNA repair and oncogenesis were downregulated a parts per thousand yen3-fold change by the combination treatment. These results may be important in devising mechanism-based and targeted therapeutic strategies for prostate cancer, especially in devising combination therapy for drug resistant prostate cancers