Characterizing substances into pharmacological classes using theirmorphological and metabolic profiles

Abstract: Treatment of cancers has been improved and new findings in research communities areconstantly found, but there are still many questions about how to treat these complex diseases.One way to treat cancer is to expose cancer cells to drugs that kill the cancer cells to a largerextent than the normal cell from the same as well as other tissue types. Different drugcompounds have diverse molecular effects on the cancer cells and to evaluate them, studies ondifferent cell lines were performed.Experiments were performed to study morphological and metabolic changes on treatedcells. Morphological changes in growing populations of MCF-7 cells and MCF-10A cellswere studied by using a phase contrast video microscopy (IncuCyte) image analysis. Changesin levels of metabolites and proteins were analyzed using two different mass spectrometricmethods. Hierarchical clustering was used to study the relationship between the collectedspectra and the most outstanding subgroup (cluster) was a set of compounds related toestrogens.There were apparent morphological differences between the two different cell lines, bothwhen untreated and after induction of apoptosis. This study shows that, when examining themetabolic patterns, there are tendencies among the substances studied to form clustersaccording their pharmacological classes. Although more studies have to be performed in thisarea it has been showed that there are possibilities to determine which pharmacological class asubstance belongs to by examining the morphological and metabolic patterns.