[Preclinical trials from the standpoint of clinical trials]

The establishment of reliable preclinical test is essential for the reasonable clinical trial. As a methodology for the screening of new active anticancer agents, disease oriented strategy using human tumor cell lines has been proposed in USA. The important questions in DOS are to determine the representative cell lines of specific cancer and it is also extremely important to decide the numbers of cell lines used for the screening. CPT-11, topoisomerase I inhibitor, developed in my country has been demonstrated to be active against lung cancer cell lines compared with mice tumors such as S-180 and P-388. However, no compound is demonstrated to be clinically active so far by this methodology. The criteria for the application of clinical trial are obscure and each drug company decides empirically by themselves. We have proposed to use PEI (predictive efficacy index) for the prediction of antitumor activity of new compounds. The clinical effect of new platinum analogue well correlated with this value. We have conducted phase II trial of 5-FU + LV against NSCLC without no prior chemotherapy. No responder was observed in the trial. Augmentive effect of leucovorin on the cytotoxicity of 5-FU and FdUrd was examined in vitro against NSCLC and colon cancer cell lines. Leucovorin stimulated the cytotoxicity of both drugs only against colon cancer cell lines. We tried to predict the response rate of new platinum derivative based on the data of bioassay of patient's serum administrated with platinum compounds. The predicted response rates of 254-S were 57-67% and 16-27% against SCLC and NSCLC, respectively.(ABSTRACT TRUNCATED AT 250 WORDS)