Abstract
To improve clinical results of cancer chemotherapy, it is important to select the most effsctive anti-cancer drug among many agents based on chemosensitivity test in each patient. We described in this paper, history, classification, and charachteristics of each sensitivity test. We also stated the outline and clinical usefullness of the succinate dehydrogenase inhibition (SDI) test that we have introduced in our institute as a clinical chemosensitivity test since 1984. The SDI test is a useful chemosensitivity test of clinical tumor specimens, since it is rapid, inexpensive, reliable, and convenient so that it has now been widely employed. To date, we have had data of clinical results with regard to SDI test against 4649 specimens from various human tumors. The data indicated that the chemosensitivity might be related to several factord such as histology, defferentiation, cell proliferative activity, intracellular enzyme concerning DNA synthesis, DNA ploidy pattern, and hormone receptor, and so on. We also found that the clinical results of chemotherapy were well correlated with the chemosensitivity by SDI test. We concluded that further improvement of clinical results of chemotyerapy for various human cancer will be brought in accordance with the progress of in vitro chemosensitivity test in future.
