Cultures of Surgical Material from Lung Cancers: A Kinetic Approach

Despite great advances in our understanding of the molecular basis of lung cancer, the efficacy of chemotherapy of lung cancer remains disappointingly low (1 ). Most of the drugs with established activity against lung cancer were developed using mice with transplantable solid tumors of either murine or human origin. In the 1980s, methods were developed for semi-automated testing of drugs against multiple cell lines (2 ,3) . This allowed the feasibility of an alternative, in vitro approach to the discovery of new anticancer drugs to be explored. Thirty cell lines representing eight lung cancer pathologies, together with 76 other cell lines representing other carcinomas, gliomas, leukemias, melanomas, and sarcomas, were collected in a major initiative by the U.S. National Cancer Institute (NCI) (4) . Tens of thousands of new drugs have been screened against this panel and multiple relationships linking growth inhibition, resistance mechanisms, and other genetic characteristics have been elucidated (5 ,6) . However, recent studies have also highlighted the differences between cell lines and tumors growing in vivo. In particular, the patterns of gene expression of cell lines in the NCI cell line panel, when measured by microarray analysis, are more like each other than like those of tumors growing in vivo (7) .