Tumorsphere assay provides more accurate prediction of in vivo responses to chemotherapeutics

Although the sphere culture system has been widely used in stem cell biology, its application for drug screening is limited due to lack of standardized, rapid analytical tools. To optimize sphere cultures for in vitro screening of drugs, we evaluated the properties of primary tumor cells growing as tumorspheres and compared their chemosensitivity to those of cells growing in monolayer. Most cells in tumorsphere cultures were quiescent whereas cells in monolayer culture had a high mitotic index. Moreover, doxorubicin showed better cytotoxicity than paclitaxel in the sphere cultures, but their efficacy was reversed in the monolayer cultures. Importantly, the response of cytotoxic outcomes for suspension cultures matched the in vivo response better than monolayer cultures, providing support for the use of short term suspension cultures of primary cells as a model for drug testing.