Abstract
It has been known that there are individual differences in terms of effectiveness of anticancer agents for advanced skin cancers even in cases when patients had the same type of cancer. The chemosensitivity test for advanced stomach cancers has been covered by insurance since 2000 in Japan and it is now widely used in anticancer chemotherapy to determine the maximum effect with minimum side effects.
It would be possible to generalize the tests in skin cancers because of their superficial location on the skin and the facility of their repeated excision. A three-dimensional cellular growth assay using a collagen gel matrix with an MTT assay, one of the chemosensitivity tests, has been applied to four cases of advanced skin cancers (malignant clear cell adenoma, malignant eccrine poroma, squamous cell carcinoma and malignant melanoma) and to two cases of lymphoma from 1999 to 2000. The anticancer agents tested are 5-Fu, adriamycin, cisplatin, bleomycin, actinomycin D, dacarbazine, etoposide and vincristine. Furthermore, the appearance of multidrug resistance (MDR) agents, which include p-glycoprotein, MDR-related protein, lung resistance protein, glutathion-s-transferase π and topoisomerase, was studied immunohistochemically in six cases.
A chemosensitivity test is useful to determine regimens of chemotherapy. Each case showed sensitivity to some anticancer agents and some MDR agents. There is, however, no considerable relationship between drug resistance and MDR agents. [Skin Cancer (Japan) 2002; 17: 83-88]
