Clinical Correlations of Drug Sensitivity in the Human Tumor Stem Cell Assay

Quantitation of chemosensitivity in acute myelocytic leukaemia

“…The 84% of patients correctly classified by the best method tested in our study is similar to results obtained by Park et al (1980) for acute nonlymphocytic leukaemia (80%), Salmon et al (1980) (89%) and Moon et al (1981) (78%). The latter two studies tested samples from ovarian cancer, myeloma and melanoma patients.…”

“…The latter two studies tested samples from ovarian cancer, myeloma and melanoma patients. In our study as well as that of Park et al (1980) the true positive rate was higher than the true negative rate, whereas in the studies of Salmon et al (1980) and Moon et al (1981), the opposite was the case. This may be expected due to the higher proportion of CRs obtained in the AML groups.…”

“…This may be expected due to the higher proportion of CRs obtained in the AML groups. We found as did Salmon et al (1980), and Moon et al (1981) that the percentage survival of 0. lx plasma C x T was a better discriminator than the percentage survival at the plasma C x T. The cut-off point of 38% (Meyskens et al, 1981), however, was not as low as points of discrimination determined in our study by discriminant analysis and did not result in as many correct classifications.…”

“…AML should provide a suitable model for evaluation of the use of a colony inhibition assay (Salmon et al, 1978(Salmon et al, , 1980 to predict clinical response to chemotherapy, because of the ease of sample collection, the lack of requirement for enzyme digestion to obtain single cell suspensions, a high percentage of patients whose tumour cells form colonies in semi-solid media and the significant number of patients who achieve complete remission. Guidelines for determining the assay parameters of C (initial drug concentration) and T (duration of exposure), and for optimal analysis of the data obtained require resolution.…”

An assessment of a short-term tumour chemosensitivity assay in chronic lymphocytic leukaemia

“…Of greatest interest in recent years have been the so-called tumour colony forming or stem cell assays (Courtenay & Mills, 1978;Hamburger & Salmon, 1977;Salmon et al, 1978Salmon et al, , 1980Von Hoff et al, 1981). However, although these assays have a relatively sound theoretical basis, there are a number of practical difficulties: they are very time consuming; results can only be obtained from 25% of samples tested (Von Hoff et al, 1981); and some types of tumour cannot be tested at all.…”