For the treatment of head and neck cancers, we usually have used surgical intervention because of its location with contiguity of critical structures and low sensitivity to chemotherapeutic agent. The application of neoadjuvant chemotherapy is increas...
For the treatment of head and neck cancers, we usually have used surgical intervention because of its location with contiguity of critical structures and low sensitivity to chemotherapeutic agent. The application of neoadjuvant chemotherapy is increasing recently. Because of this there are efforts for the development of in vitro testing methods of the chemosensitivity of head and neck cancers. But it is still insufficient and especially in oral cancers, it is more difficult to culture the tumor cells in vitro than that of other organs. There is no specific methods for in vitro chemosensitivity testing of oral cancers with high sensitivity. MTT[3-(4,5- dimethy1-2-thiazoy1)-2,5-dipheny1-2H tetrazolium bromide] assay is a colorimentric analysis to measure mitochondrial succinate dehydrogenase (SDH) activities. This method is known to be a methods to measure the viability of cells with high sensitivity. In this study we used the MTT assay for oral cancer cell line and tumor samples attained from biopsies to evaluate chemosensitivity of various chemotherapeutic agents for the common and the specific chemosensitivity of oral cancers. We used KB, an oral cancer cell line, and 5 primary tumor samples obtained during surgery or biopsies. The primary tumor samples were short term cultured. When there were growth of tumor cells, they were typsinized and put into the 96 well plate with 2X103 cells for each well and test with several drug. Drugs used in this study were adriamycin(ADM), 5-fluorouracil(5-FU), cisplatin(DDP), and mitomycin C(MMC). Each drugs are used in 10 g/mL, 25 g/mL, 50 g/mL, 75 g/mL, and 100 g/mL concentrations. They were incubated for 48hours and measured cell survival using MTT assay. Sensitivity of oral cancer for each drug used were as follows. In KB cell line ADM was the highest inhibition in same concentration. MMC had the highest sensitivity and DDP was quite similar. 5-FU showed highest resistance. This trends were all the same as primary culture of tumor cells. Primary culture of tumor cells showed some differences in the chemosensitivity of each sample. There were no significant differences. Overall chemosensitivity was more resistant than KB cell line. IC50 for KB cell line were 1.96 g/mL for ADM, 18.0 for DDP, 47.3 for 5-FU and 14.0 for MMC. ADM showed the lowest IC50 and 5-FU the highest. In tumor samples, 5-FU showed similar IC50(48.65 g/mL) as KB cell line. But other drugs showed increased IC50 values(ADM : 2.74, DDP:30.44, MMC 24.52 g/mL).