Detection of polyol accumulation in a new ovarian carcinoma cell line, CABA I: a(1)H NMR study

Ovarian carcinomas represent a major form of gynaecological malignancies, whose treatment consists mainly of surgery and chemotherapy. Besides the difficulty of prognosis, therapy of ovarian carcinomas has reached scarce improvement, as a consequence of lack of efficacy and development of drug-resistance. The need of different biochemical and functional parameters has grown, in order to obtain a larger view on processes of biological and clinical significance. In this paper we report novel metabolic features detected in a series of different human ovary carcinoma lines, by (1)H NMR spectroscopy of intact cells and their extracts. Most importantly, a new ovarian adenocarcinoma line CABA I, showed strong signals in the spectral region between 3.5 and 4.0 p.p.m., assigned for the first time to the polyol sorbitol (39+/-11 nmol/10(6) cells). (13)C NMR analyses of these cells incubated with [1-(13)C]-D-glucose demonstrated labelled-sorbitol formation. The other ovarian carcinoma cell lines (OVCAR-3, IGROV 1, SK-OV-3 and OVCA432), showed, in the same spectral region, intense resonances from other metabolites: glutathione (up to 30 nmol/10(6) cells) and myo-inositol (up to 50 nmol/10(6) cells). Biochemical and biological functions are suggested for these compounds in human ovarian carcinoma cells, especially in relation to their possible role in cell detoxification mechanisms during tumour progression.