Mitomycin C is a quinone-based antitumor antibiotic that crosslinks the complementary strands of the DNA double helix with exquisite base- and regioselectivity for the N2 of guanine. (1) It first entered clinical trials in 1958 has been employed since 1974 in combination chemotherapy treatments (2)

Mitomycin C has been shown to induce apoptosis through caspase processing. In MCF-7 breast cancer cell lines, mitomycin C treatment led to active caspase-7, -8, and -9 processing, with minimal effect to caspase-3. (3)

More recently, mitomycin C was observed to act irreversibly upon thioredoxin reductase (TrxR) in a time- and concentration-dependent manner. In DTNB and insulin assays, mitomycin C inhibited TrxR at IC50s of 3 uM and 1 uM, respectively. (4)