Drug toxicity assessment: cell proliferation versus cell death

Elena V Sazonova; Mikhail S Chesnokov; Boris Zhivotovsky; Gelina S Kopeina

doi:10.1038/s41420-022-01207-x

Drug toxicity assessment: cell proliferation versus cell death

Cell Death Discov. 2022 Oct 14;8(1):417. doi: 10.1038/s41420-022-01207-x.

Authors

Elena V Sazonova^#¹, Mikhail S Chesnokov^#¹, Boris Zhivotovsky^{2

3}, Gelina S Kopeina⁴

Affiliations

¹ Faculty of Medicine, MV Lomonosov Moscow State University, Moscow, Russia.
² Faculty of Medicine, MV Lomonosov Moscow State University, Moscow, Russia. boris.zhivotovsky@ki.se.
³ Division of Toxicology, Institute of Environmental Medicine, Karolinska Institute, Stockholm, Sweden. boris.zhivotovsky@ki.se.
⁴ Faculty of Medicine, MV Lomonosov Moscow State University, Moscow, Russia. lirroster@gmail.com.

^# Contributed equally.

Abstract

Analysis of the toxicity of chemotherapeutic drugs is one of the main tasks of clinical pharmacology. Decreased viability of tumor cells may reflect two important physiological processes, namely the arrest of proliferation associated with disturbances in cellular metabolism or actual cell death. Elucidation of the exact processes mediating a reduction in the number of cells is fundamentally important to establish the mechanisms of drug action. Only the use of a combination of cell biological and biochemical approaches makes it possible to understand these mechanisms. Here, using various lines of tumor cells and a set of methodological approaches, we carried out a detailed comparative analysis and demonstrated the possible ways to overcome the uncertainties in establishing the mechanisms of cell response to the action of chemotherapeutic drugs and their toxicity.