Anti-Cancer Drug Screening

The Anti-Cancer Drug Screening Facility (ACDSF) at ACTREC supports the efforts of anti-cancer drug development in India, with in vitro and in vivo anti-cancer drug screening assays that have been developed in-house. ACDSF has 53 human tumor cell lines, 10 murine tumor models and 38 xenograft models for carrying out drug screening. During 2017, 1345 compounds were received from 161 clients including eight corporate R&D organizations from 13 states across India. In all, 1287 compounds were tested for their in vitro activity and 58 compounds were examined for MTD (n=14) and in vivo efficacy assays (n=44).

Two new xenografts namely KG-1 (leukemia) and HCC1954 (breast cancer) were developed during the report year. The facility has successfully completed XII-plan CSIR funded project ‘Affordable cancer therapeutics’ in collaboration with IICT, Hyderabad (2012-17). Of the second set of 300 compounds, 11 compounds were found to be active against four cancer cell lines (Hep-G2, HT-29, SCC-29B and PLC-Prf-5).

Three of these compounds that were most active against oral cancer spheroids (CSC) were further tested for their in vivo efficacy against oral cancer xenograft AW13516. Only one of these (AKL-JA) was found to be strongly active against the AW13516 xenograft. Corroborative evidence was obtained through PET-CT imaging of tumor bearing animals and histopathology of tumor sections.