Findings presented at the 41st Annual Meeting of the European Society for Clinical Investigation in Uppsala, Sweden, April 18, 2007, concluded that Functional Profiling with cell culture assays is relevant for the study of both "conventional" and "targeted" antineoplastic drug agents (antitumor and antiangiogenic activity of Iressa, Tarceva, Sutent, Nexavar and Avastin in primary cultures of "fresh" human tumors).
Cell Culture Assays with "cell-death" endpoints can show disease-specific drug activity, are useful clinical and research tools for "conventional" and "targeted" drugs, and provide unique information complementary to that provided by "molecular" tests. There have been more than 25 peer-reviewed publicatons showing significant correlations between cell-death assay results and patient response and survival.
The Funtional Profiling technique is a cell-death endpoint assay in which drug effect upon cancer cells is visualized directly. Photomicrographs of actual tumor cells sometime show that the exact same identical individual culture well, shows some clusters have taken up vast amounts of a drug, while right next door, clusters of the same size, same appearance, same everything haven't taken up any of the drug.
So it doesn't matter if there is a "target" molecule (protein or receptor) in the cell that the targeted drug is going after, if the drug either won't "get in" in the first place or if it gets pumped out/extruded or if it gets immediately metabolized inside the cell, drug resistance is multifactorial. The advantage of the Funtional Profiling technique is that it can show this in the "population" of cells.
The Funtional Profiling technique makes the statistically significant association between prospectively reported test results and patient survival. It can correlate test results which are obtained in the lab and reported to physicians prior to patient treatment, with significantly longer or shorter overall patient survival depending upon whether the drug was found to be effective or ineffective at killing the patient's tumor cells in the laboratory.
This could help solve the problem of knowing which patients can tolerate costly, new treatments and their harmful side-effects. These "smart" drugs are a really exciting element of cancer medicine, but do not work for everyone, and a test to determine the efficacy of these drugs in a patient could be the first crucial step in personalizing treatment to the individual (Eur J Clin Invest 37 (suppl. 1):60, 2007).
http://weisenthal.org/Weisenthal_ESCIa.pdf