| abstract |
An improved system for screening a multiple of candidate therapeutic or chemotherapeutic agents for efficay as to a specific patient, in which a tissue sample from the patient is harvested, cultured and separately exposed to a plurality of treatments and/or therapeutic agents for the purpose of objectively identifying the best treatment or agent for the particular patient. Specific method innovations such as tissue sample preparation techniques render this method practically as well as theoretically useful. One particularly important tissue sample preparation technique is the initial preparation of cohesive multicellular particulates of the tissue sample, rather than enzymatically dissociated cell suspensions or preparations, for initial tissue culture monolayer preparation. By subjecting uniform samples of cells to a wide variety of active agents (and concentrations thereof), the most promising agent and concentration for treatment of a particular patient can be determined. |