Antisense ferritin oligonucleotides inhibit growth and induce apoptosis in human breast carcinoma cells.

Background: Ferritin is the major iron-storage protein which sequesters and detoxifies excess iron that is taken up by cells but is not utilized in normal metabolic processes. Human ferritin consists of various combinations of heavy (FerH, Mr 21,000) and light (FerL, Mr 19,000) chains and excess iron leads to an increase in the synthesis of both heavy and light chains.

Materials And Methods: In this study four pairs of antisense oligodeoxynucleotides (ODNs) were synthesized: FerH-A1 and FerL-A1 were complementary to the 24-base pair sequence overlapping the starting codons of the FerH and FerL genes, respectively, but the sequences of FerH-A2 and FerL-A2 only covered the coding sequences of the ferritin genes.