From Toxicity to Selectivity: Coculture of the Fluorescent Tumor and Non-Tumor Lung Cells and High-Throughput Screening of Anticancer Compounds

Frontiers in Pharmacology. 2021. Vol. 12. Article 713103.

Skvortsov D., Kalinina M., Zhirkina I., Vasilyeva L., Ivanenkov Y., Sergiev P., Dontsova O.

For the search of anticancer compounds in modern large chemical libraries, new approaches are of great importance. Cocultivation of the cells of tumor and non-tumor etiology may reveal specific action of chemicals on cancer cells and also take into account some effects of the tumor cell’s microenvironment. The fluorescent cell cocultivation test (FCCT) has been developed for screening of substances that are selectively cytotoxic on cancerous cells. It is based on the mixed culture of lung carcinoma cells A549’_EGFP and noncancerous fibroblasts of lung VA13_Kat, expressing different fluorescent proteins. Analysis of the cells was performed with the high-resolution scanner to increase the detection rate. The combination of cocultivation of cells with scanning of fluorescence reduces the experimental protocol to three steps: cells seeding, addition of the substance, and signal detection. The FCCT analysis does not disturb the cells and is compatible with other cell-targeted assays. The suggested method has been adapted for a high-throughput format and applied for screening of 2,491 compounds. Three compounds were revealed to be reproducibly selective in the FCCT although they were invisible in cytotoxicity tests in individual lines. Six structurally diverse indole, coumarin, sulfonylthiazol, and rifampicin derivatives were found and confirmed with an independent assay (MTT) to be selectively cytotoxic to cancer cells in the studied model.

Keywords: Cytotoxicity, ultrahigh-throughput screening, Anticancer compounds, phenotypic screening, lung cancer model