A better way to measure cell survival
Measuring the toxic effects of chemical compounds on different types of cells is critical for developing cancer drugs, which must be able to kill their target cells. Analyzing cell survival is also an important task in fields such as environmental regulation, to test industrial and agricultural chemicals for possible harmful effects on healthy cells. MIT biological engineers have now devised a new toxicity test that can measure chemical effects on cell survival with much greater sensitivity than some of the most popular tests used today. It is also much faster than the gold-standard test, which is not widely used because it takes two to three weeks to yield results. The new test could thus help drug companies and academic researchers identify and evaluate new drugs more rapidly. “Cytotoxicity assays are one of the most commonly used assays in life sciences,” says Bevin Engelward, a professor of biological engineering at MIT and the...