Cheburator software for automatically calculating drug inhibitory concentrations from in vitro screening assays

PLoS One. 2014 Sep 3;9(9):e106186. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0106186. eCollection 2014.

Abstract

In the process of new cancer drug development, as the first step of their assessment, their activities are usually studied in vitro against a panel of cancer cell lines. The results of these in vitro drug screening assays are commonly expressed as inhibitory concentration 50% (IC50): the concentration of the tested agent that inhibits the proliferation of the cancer cell population to 50% of the theoretically possible effect (absolute IC50) or maximum effect practically achieved by the drug (relative IC50). The currently available software for calculating IC50 values requires manual data entry, is time consuming, and is prone to calculation errors. Thus, we have developed open source, free, easy-to-use software for performing standardized data evaluations and automatically calculating the IC50. This software eliminates the laborious and error-prone manual entry of data, substantially reduces the amount of time spent for data analysis. It has been extensively used in our department as the main tool for in vitro data processing during the past several years and can be useful for other research groups working in the area of anticancer drug discovery, either alone or combined with other software packages. The current version of our program, Cheburator, together with sample data, source code, and documentation, is freely available at the following URL: http://www.cheburator.nevozhay.com (it is free for academic use, but a license is required for commercial use).

Publication types

  • Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't

MeSH terms

  • Algorithms*
  • Antineoplastic Agents / pharmacology*
  • Cell Line, Tumor
  • High-Throughput Screening Assays / statistics & numerical data*
  • Humans
  • Inhibitory Concentration 50
  • Neoplasms / drug therapy
  • Research Design
  • Software*

Substances

  • Antineoplastic Agents

Grants and funding

This work was supported by a joint fellowship from the Jozef Mianowski Fund and the Foundation for Polish Science to Dmitry Nevozhay and by Program #1326 from the Ministry of Education and Science, Russian Federation. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.