Cytotoxicity and Cell Viability

Cytotoxicity and Cell Viability Assays
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Cytotoxicity is the quality of being toxic to a cell. Assessing the effect of novel drugs or therapies on in vitro cell viability and health is critical to ensure a treatment is safe and effective. There are many types of cytotoxicity and viability assays available for primary, stem cell-derived, cancer, bacterial, or virus-infected cell culture. When deciding on an assay, some things to consider are:

  • >> Are my dyes or reagents toxic? Do they interfere with the biology I wish to study?
  • >> How do I know which timepoints to take?
  • >> How complex is the assay and how much hands-on time will it require?
  • >> How much are the reagents, plates, and cells?

The Maestro impedance assay offers a simple solution to those questions. No dyes or complex handling. One plate reveals the full cellular response in one simple assay.

In vitro real time, label free cytotoxicity assays

Dose response curves: get the best fit for your data
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The cytotoxicity of a treatment depends on the delivered dose. Easily see your result with the Maestro Z platform in real-time and easily generate dose-response curves at multiple timepoints from one simple assay.

The cytotoxicity of a treatment depends on the delivered dose. With increasing concentration of Dox, the real-time resistance (left) and cytolysis (middle) curves show increased cytotoxicity. The cytolysis was evaluated as a function of the concentration (right) and fit according to the Hill equation. The analysis estimates the 50% effective concentration (EC50) of Dox to be 0.43 micromolar at 72 hours post-dose.

Resistance measurements over time at different doses
Cytolysis data for dose response
Dose response curve

(Left) SKOV3 cancer cells were cultured at 5k cells per well in a CytoView Z 96-well plate. After 24 hours of culture, the SKOV3 cells were dosed with Dox at 9 concentrations in half-log increments from 0.01 to 100 micromolar. The highest concentrations of Dox produced the lowest measured resistance over time. (Middle) The Dox treated wells were compared with the “No Treatment Control” condition to compute cytolysis. The cytolysis was higher for increasing concentrations of Dox. (Right) The Hill equation was fit to the cytolysis data at 72 hours post-dose. The EC50 in this assay was 0.43 micromolar according to the dose response analysis.