A Comparative Study Of Three Cell-based Drug Screening Methods

Common methods in cell-based anti-cancer drugs screenings are: MTT, SRB,CCK-8, Acid Phosphatase, ATP bioluminescence, etc. However, newly developedmethods based on cellular fluorescence, especially GFP is gaining popularity for itshigh throughput capabilities, fast and reliable data collection. This article select widelyused MTT, SRB to campare and validate cell fluorescent methods based on a greenfluorescent cell line developed in our laboratory. This study showed that the newlydeveloped cell line is suitable for first-stage rapid screening of anticancer drugs toobtain potential lead compounds.MTT colorimetric method, because of its easy adaptation, is widely used in manylaboratories as a primary method for cell-based screening of anti-cancer drugs.However, MTT colorimetric method is prone to operation variations and often suffersfrom poor data reproducibility.SRB method is a improvement and is more sensitive and accurate, particularlyfor large-scale drug screening. United States National Cancer Institute (NCI) has itlisted as one of the standard screening method for anti-cancer drugs. However, SRBstill consist dyeing of cells wich is another step to introduce data variations. Here, wereport the development of a new cell-based drug screening system using Green FluorescenceProtein (GFP) which is simple, time saving and reliable. Our data show that the GFP results arefast to obtain, more consistent and reliable than MTT. Our data also confirmed that this assaysystem is comparable or better than the MTT-based assays in terms of sensitivity and accuracy forthe measurement of cell growth curve, inhibition by anticancer drugs, dosage response, as well asin IC50determination of anti-cancer drugs.