A new cytotoxicity assessment method using concentration & time cellular response curves

Many toxicity indices have been developed to assess the cytotoxicity, such as LC50, AUC50 and KC50 and so on. Comparing to the end-point indices (such as LC50), the dynamic indices (AUC50, KC50) can capture the kinematic information of cell growth inhibition or cell damage. However, those dynamic indices are very sensitive to the experimental noise and the shape of cellular response curve. In order to overcome those problems, a new toxicity index, named DC50 using the Fast Fourier transform (FFT) algorithm, was proposed in this study. The proposed index describes cellular kinematic behavior when cells exposed to the test chemical. Bio-experiment of HepG2 cell line exposure to 14 test chemicals was used to demonstrate theperformance of DC50. According to the analysis using the Register Cytotoxicity (RC) model, the correlation between DC50 and LD50 75.98% and the proposed cytotoxicity assessment method can be an alternative to the traditional cell based in-vitro assay.