Role of Cytotoxicity Experiments in Pharmaceutical Development

Abstract

Through the twentieth century, the road from synthetizing a new drug molecule to become an actual product got longer than ever before. Cytotoxicity assays are a quick way to assess a certain chemical compound’s effects on a given human cell line. The most well-known techniques are the MTT- and the LDH-assays. These tests are cheap, easy to execute, but not very precise and dependent on various environmental factors and also, they show no detail about the time-dependency of the toxic effect. Cytotoxicity experiments are a crucial part of a modern pharmaceutical development process. They are a cheap and safe way to get vital information about a new molecule’s biological attributes focusing on its basic tolerability. These studies not only save human lives and test animals, but they save the time and resources to be spared on a test molecule which is a complete failure having no in vitro safety. Keywords: cytotoxicity, pharmaceutical development, preformulation, cell cultures, in vitro toxicity