Abstract

Gastric cancer has become the second most common cause of cancer-related death worldwide. However, the treatment of gastric cancer is still challenging. Recently, caveolin-1 has attracted the attention because of its association with cancer-associated fibroblasts that play essential roles in tumor growth. In this study, we established a co-culture model using fibroblasts and gastric cancer cells to mimic tumor microenvironment and investigate the effect of caveolin-1 on the growth of gastric cancer cells. It was found that down-regulation of caveolin-1 in cancer-associated fibroblasts led to cellular autophagy and increased gastric cancer cell growth. This co-culture model promoted the expression of biomarkers of myofibroblasts transformation, including alpha-smooth muscle actin and vimentin. Moreover, quercetin which is a natural polyphenolic flavonoid compound, often used for the treatment of gastric cancer, showed strong inhibitory effect on gastric cancer cell growth in the co-culture; quercetin and unregulated caveolin-1 showed inhibitory activity of myofibroblasts oncogenic transformation both in vitro and in vivo. Quercetin treatment significantly reduced cancer cell migration and invasion, suppressed tumor size and weight. Taken together, our findings provided new insights on the effect of tumor microenvironment, particularly cancer-associated fibroblast, on tumor cell growth. It also illustrated the molecular mechanism of quercetin in the treatment of gastric cancer.