Clonogenic assays are the gold standard for determining radiosensitivity, which governs tumor response to radiation therapy. Although multiple studies of clonogenic assays on cancer cell lines have been published, the robustness of this technique has not been examined by comparative analysis of data from different studies. To address this issue, we investigated the inter-assay precision of clonogenic assays by analyzing in-house and published data on A549, a cell line frequently studied in this context. The coefficients of variation for SF2, the surviving fraction after 2 Gy irradiation, and D10, the radiation dose that reduces survival to 10%, were below 30% for both in-house data obtained from 20 independent experiments performed under consistent experimental settings (i.e., radiation type, dose rate, and timing of cell seeding) and data collected from 192 publications using diverse experimental settings. Multivariate analyses of the published data revealed that timing of cell seeding significantly affected SF2. These data indicate that SF2 and D10 of clonogenic assay have acceptable inter-assay precision, and that timing of cell seeding influences the inter-assay precision of SF2. These results provide a rationale for combined analysis of published clonogenic assay data, which may help to discover robust biological properties associated with tumor radiosensitivity.
Keywords: cancer cell; clonogenic assay; meta-analysis; precision medicine; radiosensitivity.