title: Soft agarose culture human tumour colony forming assay for drug sensitivity testing: [3H]-thymidine incorporation vs colony counting.
abstract: In vitro drug sensitivity testing, both by optical colony counting and by a [3H]-TdR incorporation assay, was performed on human tumour cells proliferating in soft agar cultures. Cells from two different human tumour cell lines, 5 different human tumour xenografts, and 94 different primary human tumour specimens of various histologic types were studied. Regression analysis comparing the results of the colony counting assay and the [3H]-TdR assay revealed good to excellent correlations between the two assay endpoints for quantitating the effect of in vitro anticancer drug exposure for a large number of different agents. The presence of pre-existing tumour cell aggregates complicates the performance of the optical colony counting assay. The [3H]-TdR incorporation assay is more sensitive and reproducible than the colony counting assay when performed on samples containing a large number of initially seeded tumour cell aggregates.
mesh_terms: D000970:Antineoplastic Agents / Q000494:pharmacology*; D002452:Cell Count; D002460:Cell Line; D003114:Colony-Forming Units Assay; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D009368:Neoplasm Transplantation; D009369:Neoplasms / Q000378:metabolism; D012685:Sepharose; D013936:Thymidine / Q000378:metabolism*; D014183:Transplantation, Heterologous; D014316:Tritium; D014410:Tumor Stem Cell Assay
chemical_list: D000970:Antineoplastic Agents; D014316:Tritium; D012685:Sepharose; D013936:Thymidine