Key Advantages |
Key Disadvantages |
Wealth of publically available resources for LCL genotypes, which reduces the cost of genetic mapping to only the cost of the drug response phenotyping. |
Difficulty of translating in vitroresults to in vivo biological/clinical relevance |
Fewer confounding factors compared to human clinical trials (e.g. concomitant medications, treatment regimes) |
Extrapolating in vitro test concentrations to in vivo doses or exposures |
Amenable to robotic automation which helps maintain quality control and reduces cost of testing |
Cell lines amenable to immortalization may not be from the target tissue of interest for certain drugs |
Amenable to high-throughput testing, which allows large numbers of chemicals, concentrations, cell lines, and replicates to be tested rapidly. |
Not all biological pathways are represented in LCLs, which may limit its utility for certain studies |
Availability of genetic information allows for heritability estimation of phenotypes without needing to design complex human studies |
Many metabolizing enzymes (e.g. CYP450s) are not represented in LCLs and other cell lines, which under some circumstances can make testing pro-drugs and other therapeutics challenging. |
LCLs can be easily manipulated to validate study findings using knock-down or forced gene expression methods. |
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