A first experience with in vitro testing of the sensitivity of brain tumorcells to chemotherapeutic drugs

Brain cancer is unregulated cell proliferation with the additional property of invasiveness. The recurrence of human gliomas several months after surg ical treatment (wheter or not accompanied by radio or chemotherapy) suggest s that intrinsic resistance to all kinds of therapies underlies the failure of therapy. The aim of this paper was to determine in vitro chemosensitivi ty of br ain tumor cells isolated from patients suffering from disease. Bra in tumor cells were evaluated in 12 patients with diagnosis of glioblastoma (WHO grade IV). A histoculture drug response assay was used for the determ inantion of chemoresitance; The results revealed a high variability of the tumor samples in response to three selected chemotherapeutic agents: cispla tin, dacarbazine and taxol. The variations in LC50 in these drugs were in t he range from 0.71 to 98.3 mu g.mL(-1) for cisplatin, from 39.9 to 431.4 mu g.mL(-1) for dacarbazine and from 5.1 to 44.5 mu g.mL(-1) for taxol. In vi tro variability is comparable with the in vivo clinical response variabilit y found in relevant literature. According to our results the most effective agent in in vitro testing seemed to be dacarbazine which is in good agreem ent with clinical experience in its uses and this finding is supported by c linical experience of the use of this drug. Although more experiments and a direct comparison with the clinical outcome in every single patient is nee ded to support our preliminary results a histoculture drug response assay c an play an important clinical role in the optimization of individualized ca ncer chemotherapy.