The erythroleukemia cell line HEL (human origin) was originally obtained from ATCC (HEL 92.1.7), and maintained mycoplasma free used in all experiments.19 (link),20 (link) The generation of inducible K562-fli1 cells is described elsewhere.20 (link) These cells were maintained in Dulbecco’s Modified Eagle Medium supplemented with HyClone 5% fetal bovine serum (GE Healthcare).
The HEL cells were treated with indicated drugs, used for cell counting/MTT assay (to determine the proliferation index) and for protein/mRNA extraction (for Western blotting and RT-qPCR). Famotidine was purchased from (APExBIO), Tetrandrine from (Solarbio, CN), EGC from (Selleckchem, CN) and Diacerein from (APExBIO).