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. 1985 Sep;52(3):303–310. doi: 10.1038/bjc.1985.194

Soft agarose culture human tumour colony forming assay for drug sensitivity testing: [3H]-thymidine incorporation vs colony counting.

C A Jones, T Tsukamoto, P C O'Brien, C B Uhl, M C Alley, M M Lieber
PMCID: PMC1977184  PMID: 4041359

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.

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Selected References

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