A feasibility study of adenosine triphosphate-based chemotherapy response assay (ATP-CRA) as a chemosensitivity test for lung cancer.
OBJECTIVE
A chemosensitivity test can reflect the differences in responses of individual cancer patients to chemotherapeutic agents. The adenosine triphosphate-based chemotherapy response assay (ATP-CRA) is an accurate method, which does not require a large amount of tissue specimen. So far, no studies have evaluated the utility of the ATP-CRA in Korea. Therefore, we investigated the clinical usefulness of the ATP-CRA in 53 patients with lung cancer.


METHODS
Tumor tissues were obtained from bronchoscopic biopsies or surgical resections. The validity of ATP-CRA was assessed focusing on the success rate, experimental error level (intraassay mean coefficient of variation [CV]) and reproducibility.


RESULTS
The overall success rate of ATP-CRA was 90.6% (48/53). Normal cells were effectively eliminated from the tumor tissues with the use of ficoll gradient centrifugation and immunomagnetic separation, which was confirmed using loss of heterozygosity analysis of the 3p deletion. The mean CV of ATP assays was 10.5+/-4.6%. The reproducibility of ATP assays was 94+/-3.8%. The results of the ATP assays were reported to physicians within 7 days of specimen collection. More than 6 anticancer drugs were tested on the tumor specimens obtained from bronchoscopic biopsies.


CONCLUSIONS
The ATP-CRA is a stable, accurate and potentially practical chemosensitivity test in patients with lung cancer.
Kang
Shin Myung
SM
Department of Internal Medicine, Yonsei University College of Medicine, Seoul, Korea.
Park
Moo Suk
MS
Chang
Joon
J
Kim
Se Kyu
SK
Kim
Haeryoung
H
Shin
Dong-Hwan
DH
Chung
Kyung Young
KY
Kim
Dae Joon
DJ
Sohn
Joo Hyuk
JH
Choi
Sung Ho
SH
Kim
Jeongmi
J
Yoon
Eun Jin
EJ
Kim
Joo-Hang
JH