BioCentury
ARTICLE | Translation in Brief

Loosening attachment

How low-attachment assays could find new cancer drugs and targets

May 21, 2015 7:00 AM UTC

Classic soft agar colony formation is the gold standard for studying oncogenic transformation in vitro, but the assays don't lend themselves to high throughput screening. A group at Harvard University has created a way to incorporate colony formation in discovery screening by modifying the surface of plates used for growing cells to allow loose rather than tight attachment, which mimics the conditions of soft agar. The new assay measures the same hallmark property as soft agar - anchorage-independent cell growth - and can catch many compounds and targets missed by standard high throughput screens.

Soft agar assays differentiate between normal and transformed cells because only cancer cells grow and form colonies on the semisolid matrices. The assay is an effective way to test therapeutics on transformed cells, but takes about three weeks to run and requires time-consuming, imprecise counting of colonies...