Antiproliferative effects of dried Moringa oleifera leaf extract on human Wharton’s Jelly mesenchymal stem cells

Mesenchymal stem cells (MSCs) have seen an elevated use in clinical works like regenerative medicine. Its potential therapeutic properties increases when used in tandem with complementary agents like bio-based materials. Therefore, the present study is the first to investigate the cytotoxicity of a highly valued medicinal plant, Moringa oleifera, on human Wharton’s Jelly mesenchymal stem cells (hWJMSCs) and its effects on the cells’ gene expression when used as a pre-treatment agent in vitro. M. oleifera leaves (MOL) were dried and subjected to UHPLC-QTOF/MS analysis, revealing several major compounds like apigenin, kaempferol, and quercetin in the MOL, with various biological activities like antioxidant and anti-cancer properties. We then treated the hWJMSCs with MOL and noticed a dose-dependant inhibition on the cells’ proliferation. RNA-sequencing was performed to explain the possible mechanism of action and revealed genes like PPP1R1C, SULT2B1, CDKN1A, mir-154 and CCNB1, whose expression patterns were closely associated with the negative cell cycle regulation and cell cycle arrest process. This is also evident from gene set enrichment analysis where the GO and KEGG terms for down-regulated pathways were closely related to the cell cycle regulation. The Ingenuity pathway analysis (IPA) software further predicted the significant activation of (p < 0.05, z-score > 2) of the G2/M DNA damage checkpoint regulation pathway. The present study suggests that MOL exhibits an antiproliferative effect on hWJMSCs via cell cycle arrest and apoptotic pathways. We believe that this study provides an important baseline reference for future works involving MOL’s potential to accompany MSCs for clinical works. Future works can take advantage of the cell’s strong anti-cancer gene expression found in this study, and evaluate our MOL treatment on various cancer cell lines.