Activity of Anthracyclines on Human Tumors In Vitro

Abstract

The selection of new anticancer drugs for study in humans has classically required extensive preclinical testing in animal tumor models. Over 325,000 synthetic and naturally occurring compounds have been tested for antitumor activity between 1955 and 1975. Of these, 3,000–4,000 compounds have reached clinical trials in man resulting in approximately 30–40 useful compounds available commercially today (1). A reason for the large number of failures is the poor correlation between the animal antitumor data and human responses in clinical trials. Furthermore, the poor animal-human correlation may have resulted in some useful anticancer compounds in man being discarded because of poor animal antitumor activity.