DNA Cytometry and Nuclear Morphometry in Ovarian Benign, Borderline and Malignant Tumors

Chemotherapy drug potency assessment method of ovarian cancer cells by digital holography microscopy

Drug potency assessment plays a crucial role in cancer chemotherapy. The selection of appropriate chemotherapy drugs can reduce the impact on the patient's physical condition and achieve a better therapeutic effect. Various methods have been used to achieve in vitro drug susceptibility assays, but there are few studies on calculating morphology and texture parameters quantitatively based on phase imaging for drug potency assessment. In this study, digital holography microscopy was used to get phase imaging of ovarian cancer cells after adding three different drugs, namely, Cisplatin, Adriamycin, and 5-fluorouracil. Based on the reconstructed phase imaging, four parameters of ovarian cancer cells changed with time, such as the average height, projected area, cluster shade, and entropy, were calculated. And the half-inhibitory concentration of cells under the effect of different drugs was calculated according to these four parameters. The half-inhibitory concentration, which can directly reflect the drug potency, is associated with the morphological and texture features extracted from phase images by numerical fitting. So, a new method for calculating the half-inhibitory concentration was proposed. The result shows that the morphological and texture feature parameters can be used to evaluate the sensitivity of ovarian cancer cells to different drugs by fitting the half-inhibitory concentration numerically. And the result provides a new idea for drug potency assessment methods before chemotherapy for ovarian cancer.

Cisplatin effect on digital cytomorphometric and bioinformatic tumor cell characteristics in rat ovarian cancer model-a preliminary study

BACKGROUND

Ovarian cancer is one of the most common diseases of the female reproductive system. The aim of this study was the investigation of the antitumor cisplatin effect on ascitic fluid tumor cells in the ovarian cancer experimental model by digital cytomorphometry and cell bioinformatic analysis.

METHODS

Female Wistar rats were inoculated by ovarian cancer strain. After ovarian cancer transplantation rats were divided into two groups: control group-without cisplatin treatment, the experimental group-under cisplatin treatment. The ascitic fluid was taken on the 9-th day after tumor cell inoculation. Digital cytomorphometric and cytobioinformatic analysis were used to study ascitic fluid cancer cell morphofunctional changes under cisplatin treatment.

RESULTS

Digital cytomorphometric characteristics of rat ovarian cancer ascitic cells were obtained. Tumor cells were classified into four groups according to their geometric size: small, medium, large, "gigantic". The algorithm and the computer program based on tumor cell morphometric characteristics were created to calculate such cell bioinformatic characteristic as information redundancy coefficient R. Three parameters were determined as the criteria of cisplatin effect on cancer cells: cell number, nuclear/cytoplasmic ratio, R-value.

CONCLUSIONS

Data obtained suggest that cisplatin reduces the total cell number, the nuclear/cytoplasmic ratio and R-value thus indicates a decrease in cellular resistance and adaptive potential. The digital cytomorphometry and bioinformatics could be recommended as a testing system in the experimental or clinical study.

Morphological changes in the ovarian carcinoma cells of Wistar rats induced by chemotherapy with cisplatin and dioxadet

The development of new express methods for the analysis of the efficacy of anti-cancer therapy on the cellular level is highly desirable for the analysis of chemotherapeutic agent performance. In this paper we suggest the use of parameters of cell morphology determined by holographic microscopy and tomography for the effective label free quantitative analysis of cell viability under antitumor chemotherapy and thus of cytostatic agent efficacy. As shown, measured phase shifts and cell morphology change dramatically as a result of chemotherapy and depend strongly on the cell type and agent applied. Experimentally, a comparative analysis of the antitumor efficacy of the two cytostatics, cisplatin and dioxadet, that are commonly used for chemotherapy of disseminated ovarian carcinoma has been performed. The experiments were carried out on the Wistar rat model. An essential difference in the morphology of cells, both normal (erythrocytes) and cancerous, present in ascitic fluid taken from the non-treated group of rats and the groups treated with either dioxadet or cisplatin, has been observed. The results obtained can be interpreted as an indication of the antitumor performance of both cytostatics at the cellular level and as a demonstration of the higher efficacy of therapy with dioxadet as compared to that with cisplatin. Differences in cell morphology are suggested to be applied as quantitative markers of cell viability and cytostatic agent efficacy. The conclusions made are supported by a comparison with the results of recent experiments based on survival rates of laboratory animals treated with these agents..

Synthesis, X-ray crystal structure, DNA/protein binding and cytotoxicity studies of five α-aminophosphonate N-derivatives

Five new α-aminophosphonates are synthesized and characterized by EA, FT-IR, ¹H NMR, ¹³C NMR, ³¹P NMR, ESI-MS and X-ray crystallography. The X-ray analyses reveal that the crystal structures of 1-5 are monoclinic or triclinic system with the space group P 21/c, P-1, P-1, P2(1)/c and P-1, respectively. All P atoms of 1-5 have tetrahedral geometries involving two O-ethyl groups, one C_α atom, and a double bond O atom. The binding interaction of five new α-aminophosphonate N-derivatives (1-5) with calf thymus(CT)-DNA have been investigated by UV-visible and fluorescence emission spectrometry. The apparent binding constant (Kapp) values follows the order: 1 (3.38×10⁵M^-1)>2 (3.04×10⁵M^-1)>4 (2.52×10⁵M^-1)>5 (2.32×10⁵M^-1)>3 (2.10×10⁵M^-1), suggesting moderate intercalative binding mode between the compounds and DNA. In addition, fluorescence spectrometry of bovine serum albumin (BSA) with the compounds 1-5 showed that the quenching mechanism might be a static quenching procedure. For the compounds 1-5, the number of binding sites were about one for BSA and the binding constants follow the order: 1 (2.72×10⁴M^-1)>2 (2.27×10⁴M^-1)>4 (2.08×10⁴M^-1)>5 (1.79×10⁴M^-1)>3 (1.17×10⁴M^-1). Moreover, the DNA cleavage abilities of 1 exhibit remarkable changes and the in vitro cytotoxicity of 1 on tumor cells lines (MCF-7, HepG2 and HT29) have been examined by MTT and shown antitumor effect on the tested cells.