Breast cancer is one of the major
malignancies threatening women's health worldwide, and
chemotherapy tolerance has become a severe limitation of clinical treatment. Recent findings have revealed that
resveratrol, as a dietary agent with antitumour activity, could prevent
cancer progression by regulating
microRNAs (
miRNAs). Additionally, dysregulated
miRNAs have been found to contribute significantly to chemoresistance by an increasing number of studies. In this study, experiments were designed to study the functional role of
resveratrol in MCF-7 cells (low-invasive
breast cancer) in chemosensitivity to
adriamycin and to determine the targeted
miRNAs of
resveratrol and their key target
proteins linked to cell activity. We demonstrated that in
resveratrol-induced chemosensitivity, cell cycle and apoptosis were arrested in
adriamycin-resistant
breast cancer cells after modulation of the critical suppresser, miR-122-5p. Further
miRNA modulation with miR-122-5p mimics or miR-122-5p inhibitors indicated a major effect of miR-122-5p on the regulation of key antiapoptotic
proteins (
B-cell lymphoma 2 [Bcl-2]) and
cyclin-dependent kinases (CDK2, CDK4, and CDK6) in drug-resistant
breast cancer cells in response to
resveratrol. In conclusion, our results indicate that
resveratrol acts as a potential inducer to enhance the chemosensitivity of
breast cancer and also suggest that miR-122-5p is involved in the pathway of cell-cycle arrest by targeting Bcl-2 and CDKs.