The Use of Cancer Micro-Tumors for Anti-Cancer Drug Screening

The dosage of a drug that doctors administer to cancer patients can be very dubious. In a real-world scenario, if the patient is young, then they will give them a stronger dosage and if the patient is older, the doctor will give them a weaker dosage. The doctor can also perform a biopsy of the cancer, but the cancer cells quickly de-differentiate in extracorporeal environments, and this uncertainty can obviously be problematic. Therefore, the purpose of this experiment was to test if cancer micro-tumors could be cultured and if drugs can be screened on these cells. Micro-tumors are a conglomerate of cells. Micro-tumors can be vital to drug screening because they do not dedifferentiate in an extracorporeal environment. The drug that was used was doxorubicin which is a common anti-cancer drug. Then T98G cells were grown, and the cells were tested in different dosages of doxorubicin. The end goal was to see whether increased dosage of doxorubicin would decrease the volume of T98G spheroid micro-tumors. If doxorubicin was tested on cancer-cell spheroids, then higher doses of doxorubicin should cause higher degeneration in the cancer cell. In the end, the expected logarithmic decrease in cancer size as dosage increased was not seen. Even though the expected results were not found, the micro-tumors still have a net decrease in size which is positive for the development of micro-tumor drug screening