[Chemosensitivity test for human gliomas].

Abstract

In case of chemotherapy against brain tumors, it is most important to choose suitable drugs for brain tumors, since human tumors have different drug sensitivity and growth. Heretofore, human tumor clonogenic assays or human glioma-bearing nude mice models were usually used for predicting the drug sensitivity of brain tumor. Human tumor clonogenic assays are one of the best in vitro tests for anticancer drug activity. However, plating efficiency is low, sometimes preventing evaluation of drug sensitivity, and the slow growth of colonies means that culture time is long. Assays using immunodeficient mice are used for predicting the drug sensitivity of human tumors; usually results reflect the sensitivity of the parent tumor. However, procedure using athymic nude mice are slow and expensive. We took notice of Murphy's system for the chemosensitivity test, in which a human tumor is transplanted into the chorioallantoic membrane (CAM) of a chick embryo, because in this system, various kinds of human tumors could be grafted in high rate. By modifying the conventional Murphy's system, we studied the efficiency of this system in predicting the drug sensitivity of brain tumors. We compared the result of a drug sensitivity test using CAM of a chick embryo with that using nude mice. First, we studied the effect of chemotherapeutic agents such as ACNU, bleomycin. Next, we studied the effect of combination treatment of CAP or CAPF. The tumor reduction rate of the sensitivity test using a chick embryo tended to agree with that using nude mice.(ABSTRACT TRUNCATED AT 250 WORDS)