Abstract
In response to the need for inexpensive high throughput assays for anti-cancer drug screening, a 1536-well microtiter plate based assay utilizing the Alamar Blue fluorescent dye as a measure of cellular growth was validated in 10 μL assay volume. Its robustness was assessed in a screen against a library of 2000 known bioactives; with an overall Z′ value of 0.89 for assay robustness, several known cytotoxic agents were identified including and not limited to anthracyclines, cardiac glycosides, gamboges, and quinones. To further test the sensitivity of the assay, IC50 determinations were performed in both 384-well and 1536-well formats and the obtained results show a very good correlation between the two density formats. These findings demonstrate that this newly developed assay is simple to set up, robust, highly sensitive and inexpensive. It could potentially provide a rapid way to screen established and primary tumor cell lines against large chemical libraries.
Acknowledgements
Support from “Mr. William H. Goodwin and Mrs. Alice Goodwin and the Commonwealth Foundation for Cancer Research”, “The William Randolph Hearst Foundation” and “The Experimental Therapeutics Center of Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center” is greatly acknowledged. We also thank the members of the High Throughput Screening Core Facility for their help during the course of this study, and especially Dr. Christophe Antczak for critically reading the manuscript.