Marina Kalinina, Petr Sergiev and Olga Dontsova from Skoltech have co-authored a paper “From Toxicity to Selectivity: Coculture of the Fluorescent Tumor and Non-Tumor Lung Cells and High-Throughput Screening of Anticancer Compounds” that has been published in Frontiers in Pharmacology. The scientists developed fluorescent cell cocultivation test (FCCT) for screening the substances being selectively cytotoxic on cancerous cells. They used a mixed culture of lung carcinoma cells A549’_EGFP and noncancerous fibroblasts of lung, expressing different fluorescent proteins. Combining the cell cocultivation with fluorescence scanning optimizes the experimental protocol. The upgraded version comprises now three steps: cells seeding, addition of the substance, and signal detection. The suggested method has been adapted for a high-throughput format and applied for screening of 2,491 compounds. Using FCCT, the researchers have found three compounds that were reproducibly selective although they were invisible in cytotoxicity tests in individual cell lines. Full text of the paper is available here.