Revisiting Cell Screening To Find New Cancer Drug Combos

A handful of academic groups in Europe and the US are using high-throughput (HT) ex vivo screening to test the sensitivity of individual patient tumors to hundreds of combinations of cancer drugs – a strategy that in earlier iterations failed to predict response to therapy. HT screening is used routinely in drug discovery. Thanks to advances in nanoliter-scale sample handling and computational biology, evidence is slowly building of the potential of HT approaches to identify novel combination therapies, first in leukemia and hopefully for treating other cancers.

In the 1980s, researchers began using ex vivo cell screening to try to predict the efficacy of conventional chemotherapy. It didn’t work. Already discredited, the approach faded even more into...