A comparison of in vitro toxicities of cigarette smoke condensate from Eclipse cigarettes and four commercially available ultra low-“tar” cigarettes

Evaluation of In vitro Assays for Assessing the Toxicity of Cigarette Smoke and Smokeless Tobacco

“…Protocols have been written and reviewed (145,146). Many laboratories conduct this assay with CHO or Mouse embryo BALB/c cells (45,52,61–63,74,88,136,147–149). In doing this assay, it needs to be noted that prolonged exposure of the cells to the fixative can result in leaching of the dye into the solution.…”

“…For example, using the FTC smoking machine methods, Eclipse cigarettes that purportedly heat rather than burn the tobacco or electrically-heated cigarettes were reported to produce extracts with less or no cytotoxicity in different cell types compared to reference or other commercially available cigarettes (52,62,63,88,153). Separately, the cytotoxicity of TPM, CSC and GVP generated from an electrically-heated cigarette prototype under two different smoking machine conditions were reported to be lower compared to conventional and reference cigarettes on a per cigarette basis, but not on per mg TPM/CSC basis (147).…”

“…The Premiere cigarette, developed in the 1980’s, reportedly did not increase the number of revertants in four different salmonella strains compared to K1R4F, ultra light tar cigarettes and ultra light tar-menthol cigarettes (171,173). Eclipse cigarettes, that purportedly heat tobacco instead of burning it, when smoked under FTC conditions, were reported to have reduced mutagenicity compared to conventional low tar burning cigarettes (63). Experiments comparing the mutagenicity of electrically heated cigarettes against other types of cigarettes reported that electrically heated cigarettes had lower mutagenicity than Marlboro lights and Marlboro Ultra Lights (136), and that two prototypes of electrically heated cigarettes were 90% less mutagenic than conventional cigarettes (238).…”

“…Foy and coworkers tested ultralight cigarettes and Eclipse with a variety of toxicology assays and used different smoking machine regimens (63). Tar yields and toxicity increased with increasing puff volume and frequency, except for the HC method that also has 100% ventilation hole blocking.…”

Toxicological analysis of low-nicotine and nicotine-free cigarettes

“…The material collected is known as cigarette smoke condensate (CSC) and contains most of the chemicals, and particularly the carcinogens in the smoke. Furthermore, the preparation of CSC can be standardized using a smoking machines, and so CSC rather than whole smoke or mixtures of the key constituent chemicals is what is most often used in smoke research (Foy et al 2004;Hellermann et al 2002). CSC is composed of tar, nicotine and water, and though the tar has often been the focus of toxicological studies, nicotine is one of the most physiologically active components of cigarette smoke.…”