摘要Background Pancreatic cancer is one of the most lethal human cancers with a very low survival rate of 5 years.Conventional cancer treatments including surgery, radiation, chemotherapy or combinations of these show little effect on this disease. Several proteins have been proved critical to the development and the progression of pancreatic cancer.The aim of this study was to investigate the effect of resveratrol on apoptosis in pancreatic cancer cells.Methods Several pancreatic cancer cell lines were screened by resveratrol, and its toxicity was tested by normal pancreatic cells. Western blotting was then performed to analyze the molecular mechanism of resveratrol induced apoptosis of pancreatic cancer cell lines.Results In the screened pancreatic cancer cell lines, capan-2 and colo357 showed high sensitivity to resveratrol induced apoptosis. Resveratrol exhibited insignificant toxicity to normal pancreatic cells. In resveratrol sensitive cells,capan-2 and colo357, the activation of caspase-3 was detected and showed significant caspase-3 activation upon resveratrol treatment; p53 and p21 were also detected up-regulated upon resveratrol treatment.Conclusion Resveratrol provides a promising anti-tumor stratagy to fight against pancreatic cancer.