While cell-based assays are considered a different section of life sciences, they have found application and optimum use in many disciplines. Explore more about cell-based assays, their relevance, and their benefits.
What are cell-based assays?
A is used to measure various parameters in fixed or living cells, such as functional gene expression or apoptosis. It is beneficial to use cells because these cells are a complete unit that allows functional analysis and represents the reaction and underlying behaviour of living organisms in a better way when compared to biochemical assays.
These assays are used to explore protein, gene, and regulatory mechanisms and cellular functions involved in cells. They help understand potential inducers and inhibitors of the biological processes or localize the impact in the cell.
Cell-based assays have transformed over the last decade from 2D layers containing monocultures to 3D layers with multicellular assays. Many approaches use tags for luminescence, absorbance, and fluorescence measures, and other approaches offer a label-free assessment.
Types of cell-based assays
When using cell-based assays, it is possible to work with immortalised cell lines or isolated cells. The common cell-based assay types are discussed below:
- Cell viability assays are utilized to define a cell population's ability to live. It is represented in the form of a percentage.
- Proliferation assays are synonymously used with cell viability, but metabolically active or viable cells may not necessarily depict cell proliferation. Proliferation assays have a constitutive expression or DNA replication.
- Cytotoxicity assays measure the decrease in viability of cells and evaluate cell death and cytotoxicity markers.
- ROS (Reactive oxygen species) assays are used for regulating gene expression and cellular signalling.
- Migration assays are used in processes like immune defence and tissue formation.
Use of cell-based assays
Cell-based assays or cellular assays, can be used in both drug-discovery and life science research. Let's learn more about it:
Drug discovery
Cell-based assays are used in multiple drug development stages. In fact, there is a prerequisite condition to assess a drug candidate in a well-defined in vitro evaluation before moving the experimentation to live animals or human trial stages.
It is imperative to note that the drug discovery process is naturally related to finding the biological activities of different test substances. The potency of candidate drugs can be assessed using cell-based assays. Ideally, these assays help with 'hit finding' that helps identify activity in relevance to a biological target in a drug. This step is achieved with appropriate knowledge of screening libraries, complex biology, and drug screening platforms.
Additionally, an adapted assay is useful in the lead optimisation process at the time of drug development. During the drug development process, it is necessary to eliminate adverse reactions of different screened drugs, like cytotoxic impact. Various drug creators utilize cell-based assays to find out these effects, such as cell death and cytotoxicity, caused as a result of evaluated compounds. In all, screened drugs are passed through multiple cell-based assays to maximize selectivity and potency and minimize toxicity.
Cell-based assays are also beneficial in understanding the drug's biological activity. Therefore, many times this method is utilized to investigate further details of drug development, ensuring accurate unravelling of mechanisms of action (MOA).
Finally, when a drug candidate's biological activity is proven, it is necessary to identify that there are no additional reactions. Many drugs don't move on from the last stage of the assessment and trial because there are unwanted side effects in the complicated systems. Using cell-based assays helps prevent this because the method is able to find out drug side effects in an early stage. Therefore, this way drug candidates are proven or validated early in cell-based assays used for disease-relevant drug discovery.
Life science research
Cell-based assays are used in life sciences research as well to identify mechanisms of biochemical processes; both pathological and physiological states. Further, in the cell-based constructs' biomanufacturing, cells are known as building blocks because they imitate in vivo closely. For this reason, these are used for various assessment purposes.
Benefits of using cell-based assays
Cell-based assays have various applications in medicine and life sciences, here are a few;
- In comparison to biochemical assays, cell-based assays have the ability to show complex biological systems because they don't have an isolated enzyme or receptor. In fact, they contain cells as organelles, which are structured as a cellular unit. As a result, this cell-based assay complexity helps to assess cellular behaviour accurately in real-life, which offers physiological relevance and high reliability in in vitro assay, such as identifying effective drugs.
- With the help of cell-based assays, it is possible to evaluate various substance properties at one time.
- This method is effective in gauging cellular behaviour for up to months, which helps identify the effect of environmental factors as well. Moreover, advanced systems for cell-based assays allow the evaluation of living cells, offering unique analysis and insights related to life processes.
- Cell-based assays are utilized for high-throughput screening (HTS) because these have the capability to miniaturize and allow multiplexing evaluation. This means various compounds can be evaluated parallelly in varied conditions, eliminating tedious screening involving multiple steps.
Summary
Cell-based assays help study gene expression and other cell-based functions. These are frequently utilized in life sciences research and different stages of drug discovery, such as identifying biological activities and cytotoxicity. Read the above guide on cell-based assays to learn more.