Hypericin - a natural photosensitizer in photodynamic therapy on skin cancer cells

The aim of the study was to measure the effectiveness of hypericin in the photokilling of skin cancer cells after orange light irradiation. Tests were carried out on the skin cancer cells SSC-25 and MUG-Mel2, and keratinocytes HaCaT cell line with the use of hypericin and PDT. We performed cytotoxicity tests, cellular uptake with flow cytometry, and TUNEL assay to detect apoptotic bodies. In cytotoxicity experiments, don't observe difference in keratinocyte viability, but in cancer cells the after-viability was decreased by almost 50% after irradiation. In the TUNEL assay, the appearance of a large number of apoptotic bodies in cancer cell lines was observed. In the cellular uptake experiments, showed that the cell lines very fast uptake hypericin. More studies are necessary to confirm the potential anticancer activity of hypericin and shed light on various cellular and molecular mechanisms which are behind our findings.