VISUALIZING AND QUANTIFYING THE MECHANISM OF THE MICROTUBULE INHIBITOR ELR510444 IN CELL POPULATIONS USING MULTIMODAL IMAGING TECHNIQUES

Abstract

Rate of morbidity from cancer is growing up each year and number improved drugs have been releasing by pharmaceutical companies to prolong the life of cancer diagnosed patients. Among these drugs, chemotherapy play a key role to prevent the proliferation of cancer cells. Microtubule targeting drugs are popular in clinical practice, specifically taxanes and vinca alkaloids are the therapies of the first line. However, despite their effectiveness cancer cell might develop resistance when therapy is no longer effective. For this purpose, new drugs are being developed and studied to deal with the problem of multidrug resistant cell lines. One of the promising drugs for this category is ELR510444 which is microtubule targeting agent that belongs to colchicine binding domain. ELR510444 was reported to be effective against multidrug resistance and can cause vascular disruption. This drug has high effectiveness, however there are still many questions that left unanswered in terms of behavior of cells under this drug. The main purpose of this thesis is to fill this gap and compare drug with another well studied drug from the similar group Nocodazole.