Hepatocellular carcinoma ranks the fifth in the incidence of cancer and the third in the mortality rate in the world. About onemillion people die of this disease every year. Primary liver cancer is also one of the common malignant tumors in China, ranking the second in the incidence of cancer in China. Its mortality accounts for nearly one fifth of all malignant tumor deaths. The annual death toll of liver cancer in China accounts for nearly one half of the total liver cancer deaths in the world, which seriously threatens human health. The current treatment methods include surgical resection, transplantation, incisive ablation and other comprehensive treatment. However, although systemic chemotherapy with different drugs has certain efficacy for some liver cancer patients, its toxicity is serious and can not improve the survival rate, while most anticancer drugs such as tamoxifen are almost completely ineffective for liver cancer patients. Although sorafenib, the first drug in the world for the treatment of patients with advanced liver cancer, has been successfully listed. Although some progress has been made in the diagnosis and treatment of liver cancer in recent years, there is no specific therapeutic drug at present due to the high incidence, high mortality, difficult treatment and poor prognosis of liver cancer. It is urgent to develop anti-cancer drugs with high efficiency and low toxicity. It is a good choice to choose Chinese herbal extracts.

        It was found that maolanin could significantly inhibit the proliferation of human hepatoma cell lines HepG2 and Huh7, and the inhibition rate also increased with the increase of drug concentration, 48h  IC50 is 11.4  nM，37.4  Nm; maolanin induced G2-M phase arrest of cell cycle through the activation of ede2; In HepG2 cells, maolanin can induce hepg2apoptosis by up regulating the expression of Bax, bad, bik and puma, inducing the release of mitochondrial cytochrome c, initiating caspase cascade reaction, and finally activating PARP, and this mitochondrial apoptosis pathway is closely related to the down regulation of survivin. On the other hand, maolanin can induce apoptosis by activating jnk/sapk pathway. In addition, maolanin can reverse the maolanin induced apoptosis process by ectopic expression of survivin or using JNK inhibitor chemical small molecule sp600125; At the same time, the experimental results showed that many molecular cell signaling pathways were involved in maolanin induced apoptosis process, including inhibiting Akt kinase activity and jak/stat3  Signaling pathway, wntsignaling pathway and tgf-b3lsignaling pathway inhibit the proliferation of HepG2 hepatoma cells. In Huh7 cells, maolanin inhibited the proliferation of Huh7 cancer cells by inhibiting the activity of Akt kinase, down regulating the expression of Mcl-1 protein and activating PARP activity. These findings illustrateerianin It has potential medicinal value for the prevention and treatment of liver cancer.