Application of a new drug screening method for clinical chemotherapy

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We have developed the in vitro drug screening assay, scintillation assay. With this assay we can assess the chemosensitivity of solid human tumors during the 5 days following tumor resection. We found that 41%(117/569) of the human tumors gave evaluable chemosensitivity results. In vitro sensitivity was associated with clinical responses in 14 of 33 cases (42%), while in vitro resistance was associated with clinical progressive diseases in 41 of 44 cases (93%). These clinical correlation data were similar to other reports with different types of drug screening assay. we consider that tumor cell heterogeneity is one of the main reasons for low true positive accuracy in the drug screening assays. Our studies with nude mice xenografts of fresh human tumors have demonstrated that fresh human tumors are composed of heterogeneous subpopulations of cells with varying chemosensitivities and varying DNA indexes. This heterogenetic nature of human tumor cells means that a single biopsy specimen may not comprehensively define the chemosensitivity of the remaining tumor cells.