ABSTRACT
Cancer is one of the major “killers” threatening human health, but so far there is not very effective treatment. Although chemotherapy is the most commonly used for the non-surgical treatment of cancer, due to the extensive presence of tumor heterogeneity, many cases of multidrug resistance and the failure in treatment of tumors can be found everywhere. In order to avoid the blindness of chemotherapy and improve the efficiency of chemotherapy, the personalized therapy of cancer based on chemosensitivity test has come into being. After more than half a century of evolution, the new methods of chemosensitivity test have been developed continuously, with a simple, rapid, accurate and reliable trend. A series of clinical studies have confirmed the importance of chemosensitivity test in guiding personalized therapy of cancer. However, the previous literatures have not distinguished the methods of culture and detection involved in chemosensitivity test, which is easy to cause conceptual confusion. Hence, the most commonly used methods of chemosensitivity test are reorganized in this article, with emphases on the introduction of three-dimensional cell culture, bioluminescence assay, fluorescence analysis and electric cell-substrate impedance sensing, to have a more comprehensive and in-depth understanding of chemosensitivity test.