Tumor Irradiation during cancer treatment induces clonogenic death that can be best assessed by colony forming assays. These colony forming assays are laborious and never utilized in high-throughput screening (HTS) formats. We propose to develop an ?integrated platform for HTS clonogenic survival assay? for cancer drug screening as well as radiation effect modulation screening . Named ?I-PARTS ?, Integrated platform for anti-cancer radiation therapeutics screening combines the recent technological advances in cell culture automation, microfluidics, and high-speed image analysis along with NIST-traceable dosimetry based HTS X-ray irradiation. The I-PARTS adopts modular multimodal microscopy to capture the real-time colony growth with phase-contrast, luminescence, fluorescence or physical features through tomography. Commercially, the product has the scope and feasibility to analyze various cancer drugs with variable X-ray doses, and simultaneously in different cell lines. Futher, this novel single cell array clonogenic platforms will allow improved plating efficiency in clonogenic assay systems. Experimental validation and commercialization will be pursued during this proposal. I-PARTS, an integrated instrument is designed and developed to discover new cancer drugs required for combined cancer therapy. This instrument and the technology is miniaturized such that cancer drugs and radiation treatment can be tailored for individual patients, the ongoing goal of personalized medicine.
