Improvement of a screening assay for evaluation of the effects of drugs on cell migration.

• Main Authors: Chiou-Yueh Wang, 王秋月
• Other Authors: John Tsu-An Hsu
• Format: Others
• Language: en_US
• Published: 2006
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/14245131266689451623

碩士 === 國立清華大學 === 化學工程學系 === 94 === Cell migration is associated with angiogenesis, which is the phenomenon of new blood vessel formation. Angiogenesis plays an important role in cancer invasion or metastasis as well as tissue engineering. There are two specific aims in this thesis. One is to optimize cell migration assay and the other one is to discover compounds with pro- or anti-angiogenesis activity. Several published methods have been utilized to study cell migration, and we employed two methods, i.e., wound healing assay and modified Boyden chamber assay in this study because they were simple and fast. Wound healing assay was performed by scraping the monolayer of the cells with a pipette tip, and then observing the recovery ability of the cells that were treated with various compounds. The Boyden chamber was originally designed to study chemotaxis. It consists of two chambers and a chemo attractant is placed in the lower chamber, while cells are seeded on the upper chamber. There is a porous membrane between these two chambers, and only cells that migrate actively can go to the lower chamber. The degree of chemotaxis response can be determined by microscopy by counting the transmigrated cells. In addition to cell migration ability, cytotoxicities of the cells were also estimated. In this study, we found some small molecule compounds showed pro- and anti-angiogenesis potentiality. Drugs with pro-angiogenesis activity have potential application in tissue engineering, while drugs with anti-angiogenesis ability may be utilized for cancer treatment.