J.Jpn. Surg. Soc.. 88(9): 1059-1062, 1987

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Report on the annual meeting

SELECTION OF CARCINOSTATIC AGENTS AND ITS RESULTS IN CANCER THERAPY

Various sensitivity tests, such as enzymatic method, isotope uptake method, colony forming assay, subrenal capsule assay and etc, have been introduced from many institutes for the selection of anticancer drugs to each individual neoplastic tissues. These methods are, however, still incomplete in certain points theoretically and clinically and any one of them has not been used widely yet.
There are several points to be clarified by fundamental research in each method, such as elevation of colony forming rates for colony forming assay, improvement of transplantability of cancer cells to mice for subrenal capsular assay, determination of suitable concentration of drug and suitable duration of contact between cells and drugs. For clinical use, the sensitivity test should be useful to select effective drugs speedily and easily among many anticancer agents, and we need further investigation to realize an ideal method.
Using the sensitivity tests, which have been developed until present time, the predictive accuracy of the effective drugs is around 60%, and that of the uneffective drugs is more than 90%. This means we can exclude invalid medicine sufficiently from clinical use, and the determination of sensitivity should be performed widely as a prerequisite to enforce cancer chemotherapy.

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