Advantages of In Vitro Assays
Advantages of using 'Colony Forming Cell' Assays
- Quickly discover toxicity effects of compounds on hematopoietic cells
- Gain valuable information on potential inhibitory or stimulatory activity of compounds
- Determine hematopoietic lineage-specific effects of compounds
- Evaluate hematopoietic parameters in your transgenic, knock-out or other mouse models
The major reasons for treatment failure in cancer chemotherapy are high levels of toxicity to normal hematopoietic progenitor cells and drug resistance to the malignant cells. In fact, in the past 15 years greater than 50% of anticancer drugs produce myelosuppression as the dose limiting toxicity in humans.
For this reason, colony forming cell (CFC) assays are being validated as an in vitro method to gauge toxicity in drug development and determine dosage strategies.
These assays can also be used to evaluate cytokine mimics and other small molecule compounds.
Synergistic or antagonist interactions between multiple compounds can be elucidated and comparisons can be made to similar marketed compounds.
Colony forming cell assays use primary cells making them more reliable and informative than assays using cell lines. They involve the culture of progenitor cells for 1 to 2 weeks to allow for their proliferation into colonies, allowing insight into the kinetics of growth and making them a more sensitive assay than those that only measure cell death. In addition, multiple progenitor cell types can be cultured allowing the detection of lineage specificity and identification of specific target populations.
Cells from different species may be used, allowing you to highlight potential differences between humans and preclinical test species. Before in vivo studies mouse or rat cells can be used to refine doses and reduce the number of animals required for preclinical toxicology. Human cells can be used to determine accuracy of extrapolating human data from an animal model. As such, you can reduce the uncertainty of the starting dose in phase I clinical trials and treat fewer patients with ineffective doses. These assays provide the opportunity to bridge the gap between animal models and clinical trials.
CFC assays are more informative than high-throughput screening methods, less expensive and faster than in vivo models, and are highly reproducible.
