Accurate Cytotoxicity and Proliferation Determination: Advantages of a High-Throughput Phenotypic Approach Over ATP Luminescence Assays.

Cell viability and proliferation assays are a fundamental tool in the drug discovery process and are used to evaluate both the antiproliferative potency and toxicity of compounds. Some lead discovery groups generate cell viability data for up to two million compounds per screen, so any method used to assess these parameters needs to deliver not only on data quality but also on throughput and assay cost per well. Most methods used to determine cell viability cannot deliver on all three of these requirements, so compromises have to be made. Here we show the development and implementation of a cost-effective, no-wash phenotypic assay to simultaneously report the number of cells, percentage of live cells, and cell cycle phase distribution as markers of proliferation and viability. We demonstrate that this assay can be applied to high-density plate formats and be imaged and analyzed in 8 min per plate on a laser scanning imaging cytometer. By comparing the drug-responses of several well-characterized anticancer drugs on HeLa cells, we highlight the key differences between the phenotypic assay and a commercial ATP luminescence detection system.