An unbiased metric of antiproliferative drug effect in vitro

TL;DR

This paper identifies biases in current in vitro antiproliferative drug metrics and introduces the DIP rate as a time-independent alternative for more accurate assessment of drug effects.

Contribution

The study proposes the DIP rate, a novel metric derived from theoretical modeling and experiments, to improve accuracy in measuring drug efficacy in vitro.

Findings

Current metrics are biased by time-dependent effects.

The DIP rate provides a more reliable measure of drug effect.

Experimental validation supports the use of DIP rate over traditional metrics.

Abstract

In vitro cell proliferation assays are widely used in pharmacology, molecular biology, and drug discovery. Using theoretical modeling and experimentation, we show that current antiproliferative drug effect metrics suffer from time-dependent bias, leading to inaccurate assessments of parameters such as drug potency and efficacy. We propose the drug-induced proliferation (DIP) rate, the slope of the line on a plot of cell population doublings versus time, as an alternative, time-independent metric.