While many of the aforementioned assays have established track re

While many of the aforementioned assays have established track records for cytotoxicity studies, their limitation lies in the requirement for the addition of reagents making them both more cost and labor-intensive and preventing continuous measurement of a culture. Recent advances in drug cytotoxicity testing include the development of microfluidic cell culture systems or ‘lab-on-a-chip’ devices [36] and [38]. These devices have the advantage of allowing non-invasive and continuous monitoring but are more complex and costly in terms of equipment. Automation of the spectrophotometric assay described here should be easily achievable through

click here an adaptation to common microplate-handling robotic set-ups. While an internal positive control to which results are normalized reduces the need for plate-to-plate standardization, this could nonetheless be facilitated, e.g., for cytotoxicity studies of candidate drugs, by establishing large MNC

pools or using erythroleukemia cell lines. A limiting factor to the use of a hemoglobin-based assay for cytotoxicity studies is however its inability to distinguish between PLX3397 chemical structure live and dead cells, as it can only determine effects on the growth/hemoglobinization of erythroid cells but cannot detect the death of already fully hemoglobinized cells. Hemoglobinization continues past the stage where erythroid cells become cell cycle arrested and cease proliferating and large amounts of hemoglobin are still synthesized at the reticulocyte stage [35]. The assay is thus able to detect cytotoxic effects on erythroid cells during growth phase, as hemoglobinization would cease prematurely, but unable to differentiate between intact highly hemoglobinized reticulocytes and hemoglobin which may have been released into solution by lysed cells in late stages of culture. The spectrophotometric assay has been successfully used for the detection of erythropoiesis inhibiting activity in medium from P. falciparum cultures and to determine preferential growth factor concentrations

for erythroid expansion. It can further detect cytotoxic components triclocarban and react in a concentration-responsive manner. Overall, this method provides the means for rapid assessment of erythroid proliferation – either enhanced or inhibited – compared to a standard control and can thus be highly beneficial in initial screening stages to select potential conditions or candidate molecules of interest. Design of experiment (DoE) has been growing in significance for process optimization and drug design applications [18] and [32]. Coupling DoE for erythroid systems with an automatable assay such as this one to obtain the experimental results on which to build the design and verify its prediction could allow for the acquisition of large amounts of data in short periods of time.

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