Among all the literature and protocols I came across, the drug testing will always be carried out in a pre-treatment of cell with drugs then followed by disease/injury induction manners. For example, treating cell with drugs for 4 hours then add in LPS for another 4 hours before harvesting the cell for serial tests.
What will happen if I revert the sequence to induction of disease/injury and then followed by treatment?
As in real life, a disease or condition will be treated after it is being diagnosed. Will this protocol reflects a situation that is closer to the practical reality?
Hi Lee,
It’s an interesting question anyone would ask after seeing all these literature about drug testing.
Yes, nobody would take drugs before they are diagnosed with a certain disease. But here we look at this situation in a different angle.
Imagine a person whose kidneys are damaged. At a given time point if 50% of the kidneys are damaged, still 50% of his kidneys are working. So we assume the drug will be absorbed by those healthy 50% of the nephrons and fight with the disease causing the kidneys to malfunction. By this way progression of the kidney damage can be attenuated. Once the kidney function is restored, the organ will replace the damaged parts (if it was not at the End Stage Renal Damage) and the patient will be recovered.
If you treat the cells with the LPS or other cytotoxic compounds, they may not be at their best physiological fitness to respond to the drug of interest being tested.
There are other reasons too. But this is the major concept of pre-treatment.
Hope this would help you,
Good Luck,
Susara
Hi Shiyan, I am guessing, but pretreating cells in tissue culture with a drug will eliminate cells that will be killed by the drug itself.
Hence, you have cells that survive the drug and are ready to be challenged. Am I being cynical here?
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