Advanced Cell Culture Techniques for Cancer Drug Discovery

Advanced Cell Culture Techniques for Cancer Drug Discovery

Human cancer cell lines are an integral part of drug discovery practices. However, modeling the complexity of cancer utilizing these cell lines on standard plastic substrata, does not accurately represent the tumor microenvironment. Research into developing advanced tumor cell culture models in a three-dimensional (3D) architecture that more prescisely characterizes the disease state have been ...

Advanced Models for Target Validation & Drug Discovery in Prostate Cancer

Essential techniques of cancer cell culture.

A primary cell culture is the initial culture set up directly from a body tissue. Primary cancer cultures can be initiated and derived from a variety of tissue types such as solid tumor fragments (primary or metastatic) or cell suspensions, for example, aspirates, including peritoneal ascites or pleural effusions. Cell suspensions can be particularly convenient for developing cell lines as they...

Three-dimensional cell culture: the missing link in drug discovery.

Cells, grown as monolayers (2D models), are routinely used as initial model systems for evaluating the effectiveness and safety of libraries of molecules with potential as therapeutic drugs. While this initial screening precedes preclinical animal studies before advancing to human clinical trials, cultured cells frequently determine the initial, yet crucial, 'stop/go' decisions on the progressi...

Cancer cell lines for drug discovery and development.

Despite the millions of dollars spent on target validation and drug optimization in preclinical models, most therapies still fail in phase III clinical trials. Our current model systems, or the way we interpret data from them, clearly do not have sufficient clinical predictive power. Current opinion suggests that this is because the cell lines and xenografts that are commonly used are inadequat...