[gdpawel]

Amanda

The pathologist establishes a cell-line (immortalizes it) with your tumor cells. A cell-line is a product of immortal cells that are used for biological research. Cell lines can perpetuate division indefinitely. Regular cells can only divide approximately 50 times.

Cell lines are useful for experimentation in labs as they are always available to researchers as a product and do not require harvesting (acquiring of tissue from a host) every time cells are needed in the lab. They can clone cells from a cell line (HeLa cells). However, this is not what is called "chemosensitivity" testing.

Problem is (and why it will be hard for the pathologist to develop testing for individualized cancer treatments), cell lines don't recapitulate drug response patterns which exist in the body. For "drug selection," it is better to directly remove tumor microclusters straight from the body and immediately test them, before they change, as what US functional profiling labs like Rational Therapeutics and Weisenthal Cancer Group do.

Cells are taken fresh "live" in their three dimensional, floating clusters, cultured in conical polypropylene microwells for 96 hours to increase the proportion of tumor cells, relative to normal cells.

Polypropylene is a slippery material which prevents the attachment of fibroblasts and epithelial cells and encourages the tumor cells to remain in the form of three dimensional (3D), floating clusters. Our body is 3D, not 2D in form, undoubtedly, making this novel step better replicate that of the human body.

When allowed to grow in vitro, "living" cancer cells develop into these tiny microspheroid clusters that form a complex biosystem in which each malignant cell reacts upon its fellow colonists in subtle but important ways.

Analysis of microspheroids (microclusters) with cell-death assays, provides a snapshot of cancer's behavior within the human body and provides a more accurate representation of how cancer cells are likely to respond to treatment in the clinic. There is no manipulation of isolated cancer cells to make them grow, which was an important point of distinction with earlier cell-growth assays.

I've been studying cell function analysis for the last ten years.

Greg

Greg