Flow Cytometric Monitoring of Cellular Pharmacokinetics

The discovery that one drug transporter, P-glycoprotein, decreases intracellular concentrations of many anticancer drugs explains how drug resistance could simultaneously develop to structurally unrelated compounds (1 ). These discoveries have focused attention on the kinetics of drug distribution within cells. Flow cytometry can be easily adapted to collect kinetic data on fluorescent compounds by recording time as one parameter.