Is Topotecan Effective at Killing Cancer Cells?

In this paper, we analyse the behaviour of osteosarcoma cancer cells which are either exposed to the anticancer agent Topotecan or not exposed to any external agent. For the analyses of cell lineage data encoded from time lapse microscopy, we choose data mining tools that generate interpretable models of the data, and we address their statistical significance. We consider the mortality of unexposed cancer cells, the static and dynamic cytotoxic effects of the anticancer agent, the prediction of the clonal potential of resistant populations, and the differences between exposed and unexposed populations. We find that the anticancer agent affects the cells dynamics and events ratios i.e. (death/division, etc.) proportionately to its concentration, but it is ineffective at stopping the proliferation of the cancer at all dosages considered. In addition, we observe that cells exposed to the anticancer agent have greater displacements over time, indicating a putative relationship between cytotoxic effect and cell motility.