Bioassay - anticancer bioassay for natural products (Nov/25/2008 )

Hello
i am planning to seed HeLA cells to screen for potential anticancer activity from natural products.I know that my 96 well plates should contain controls like medium blank,drug blank and negative control.
i am not sure whether i should include a +ve control ( cells with a standard drug)?
If yes,what drug will be suitable for such anticancer screening assay?

Will be great to have your response
Thanks

No, i don't think it's neccissary. Once you have found some compounds that appear to have anticancer properties you can compare them to commercial drugs in vitro. Good luck

We use chlorambucil and curcumin as positive controls . Mainly to check for plate to plate and analyst to analyst variation (chlorambucil has variable toxicity so will show up minor differences in cell conditions and curcumin is good for exactly the opposite reason in that it is very consistent and will highlight pipetting errors); but like Matt said, for a quick screen they will probably not be necessary. Your other controls (media, drug & negative) all sound like the same thing?

Hiiii
Thanks DRT and Matt for ur reply..this is wat i found wen reading more about anticancer drug screening bioassays

Every test plate should include following five different types of samples:
i) Medium blanks (MB) -growth medium with no cells or drugs
ii) Drug blanks (DB) -growth medium with drug but no cells
iii) −ve control -cells plus medium
iv) +ve control -cells plus standard drug(s)
v) Test -medium plus cells plus test compound

someone told me to use camtothecin but i think this is very expensive ....but to validate my results i prefer to use a +ve control (standard drug) ...so that i can confirm that cell death is because of the standard drug and not any other condition....so i think its important to include +ve control in experiments...
thnks again

I only look at the drug blanks (controls i & ii) after finding positive leads (mainly to save money). It may depend upon the type of assay you are planning to measure cell proliferation with, some are more susceptible to interference than others.

I’ve had no experience with camtothecin so I can’t comment on its usefulness as a standard.