Critical cytotoxicity evaluation of pharmaceuticals is necessary for the clinical practice of chemotherapy. To quantitatively evaluate cell viability, currently there are two main types of sensitive methods including real-time cell analysis (RTCA) and CCK-8 assay, in which RTCA records electrochemical signal changes around an incubated cell, whereas CCK-8 is based on the colorimetric method. Despite the different detection principles adopted for the cytotoxicity assessment, the comparison of the two methods in terms of the application scope is lacking. In this study, comparison studies were conducted between the RTCA and CCK-8 assays using anticancer drugs including doxorubicin hydrochloride, curcumin, irinotecan (CPT-11), taxol, and oxaliplatin, which are classified into two groups of drug molecules in the absence and presence of additives. The cytotoxicity evaluation of these drugs on cancer cells revealed that the physicochemical properties of drug formulations such as optical and electrochemical properties are closely linked with the readout of cytotoxic methods. The experimental results suggested that the preselection of cytotoxic assay is critical for the quantitative measurement of cytotoxicity of anticancer drugs, which is of clinical importance for their therapeutic usage.

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Endometrial carcinoma (EC) is the most common malignancy in women. Dispite its prevalence, the prognosis of endometrial carcinoma still relies on conventional histological type, grade and invasion information. Its morbidity is still increasing and the outcome is very poor. To the best of our knowledge, hormonal imbalance and/or molecular genetic alterations are the main cause of EC. However, the alterations of lncRNAs which accounts for approximately 4/5 of human transcripts are still poorly understood. In the present study, using the RiboArray™ Custom Array, we studied the expression profiles of lncRNA in EC as compared to normal endometrium (NE) to find potential core lncRNAs for the diagnosis of EC. We found the potential core lncRNA by GO, KEGG, lncRNA and mRNA co-expression network. The potential functional lncRNAs were further detected by qPCR to validate the microarray results. A total of 172 lncRNAs and 188 mRNAs were found to be differentially expressed between type Ⅰ EC and the NE samples (fold change >1.5). qPCR validation showed good consistency with the microarray data. GO, pathway analysis, the lncRNA and mRNA co-expression network as well as the TCGA data revealed that 6 lncRNAs (KIAA0087, RP11-501O2, FAM212B-AS1, LOC102723552, RP11-140I24 and RP11-600K151) may be the core regulators of endometrial carcinogenesis. The potential core lncRNAs revealed by the mRNA and lncRNA co-expression network might be helpful to explore potential early diagnostic and therapeutic targets for EC.

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