Abstract
Whilst personalized medicine (where interventions are precisely tailored to a patient’s genotype and phenotype, as well as the nature and state of the disease) is regarded as an optimal form of treatment, the time and cost associated with it means it remains inaccessible to the greater public. Stratified medicine offers an option with many of the benefits without the associated costs; rather than treatments being unique to an individual, patients are grouped (stratified) according to whether they respond to a given treatment, allowing the treatment to be selected from an appropriate panel, and avoiding the common “trial and error” approach of replacing a therapy only once it is demonstrated to be ineffective in the patient. For stratification to be effective, it is necessary to develop tests that can rapidly assess whether a treatment will be effective. Here we examine the use of dielectrophoresis to determine whether cancer drugs like Iressa, Cisplatin and MTX (metateroxide) are efficatious by treating cancer cell lines (one expressing EGFR, one not) with the drug Iressa, which indicates discernable difference. We also examine the use in assessing the efficacy of combination therapies, including both chemotherapeutic and radiotherapeutic interventions. Results suggest that a DEP-based assay could potentially be used in a standard pathology laboratory setting, where biopsy cells can be screened at low cost and high speed, enabling the selection of an appropriate course of treatment from the outset, increasing patient survival rates whilst reducing time and cost for the health provider. K562 is suspension cell line, butHN5 and T47D cell lines are both adherent cells and need to be detached before any experiment. Prior to the investigation of cancer treatments, the effect of various detachment methods on these cell lines were studied to find out whether these methods could impact the electrophysiological properties of the cells. The results in investigation of detachment methods exhibit that unlike chemical substances, a harvesting method significantly alters the values of dielectric parameters.