Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)2022-11-282022-11-282018-04-20Lin, S. P., Li, W., Winters, A., Liu, R., & Yang, S. H. (2018). Artemisinin Prevents Glutamate-Induced Neuronal Cell Death Via Akt Pathway Activation. Frontiers in cellular neuroscience, 12, 108. https://doi.org/10.3389/fncel.2018.001081662-5102https://hdl.handle.net/20.500.12503/31985Artemisinin is an anti-malarial drug that has been in use for almost half century. Recently, novel biological effects of artemisinin on cancer, inflammation-related disorders and cardiovascular disease were reported. However, neuroprotective actions of artemisinin against glutamate-induced oxidative stress have not been investigated. In the current study, we determined the effect of artemisinin against oxidative insult in HT-22 mouse hippocampal cell line. We found that pretreatment of artemisinin declined reactive oxygen species (ROS) production, attenuated the collapse of mitochondrial membrane potential induced by glutamate and rescued HT-22 cells from glutamate-induced cell death. Furthermore, our study demonstrated that artemisinin activated Akt/Bcl-2 signaling and that neuroprotective effect of artemisinin was blocked by Akt-specific inhibitor, MK2206. Taken together, our study indicated that artemisinin prevented neuronal HT-22 cell from glutamate-induced oxidative injury by activation of Akt signaling pathway.http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/Aktapoptosisartemisininneuroprotectionoxidative stressArticle© 2018 Lin, Li, Winters, Liu and Yang.12