Apoptosis Assays

Our scientific team are experts in guiding which apoptosis/cell viability assays might be more suitable for your project objective

Cancers are known to exhibit resistance to conventional treatments, which contribute to relapses and disease progression. Quantification of the proportion of cells surviving a treatment is performed through cell viability assays. Screening for compound toxicity is a fundamental step in analysing the cytotoxic capability of a compound towards cancer cells. Measures from these assays are indicative of the drug’s efficiency in cell killing, or if it only cytostatic. Many of the in-house assays available to measure cell death work based on compromised cell membrane in response to drug treatment. For instance, LDH assays measure enzymatic activity that is released into the reaction mixture by cells undergoing cell death.

Cell viability is routinely measured using the MTT assay which involves the conversion of the water-soluble MTT substrate into formazan salts by actively metabolising cells. Solubilisation of the formazan salts produces a coloured solution that is measured by absorbance.

CellTiter Fluor is an alternative means of determining cell viability. Unlike MTT assay, this approach uses live-cell measurements by employing fluorogenic substrate that is proteolytically cleaved following entry into viable cells. The fluorescent signal emitted is proportional to the number of living cells.

Alternatively, CellToxTM Green Cytotoxicity Assay involves binding of reporter molecules to released DNA and the fluorescence serves as a parameter to measure the amount of cell death post-treatment.