Usefulness of chemosensitivity testing for predicting preoperative chemotherapy response in patients with gastric cancer

In order to evaluate the predictive accuracy of chemosensitivity testing and influence on the survival with pre-operative chemotherapy against gastric cancer, we carried out chemosensitivity testing using 48 endoscopically biopsied samples. Forty samples of 48 samples (83%) were considered to be evaluable for chemosensitivity. Correlations between chemosensitivity results and clinical responses with 5-FU, ADM and CDDP (FAP) therapy were evaluable in 11 patients. The true positive rate was 9/10 (90%) and the true negative rate was 1/1 (100%), yielding an overall predictive accuracy of 10/11 (91%). These results suggest that this assay system is useful for predicting drug response in pre-operative chemotherapy. However, the improvement of the survival with preoperative chemotherapy was not obtained. Further prospective randomised study may be required to evaluate the efficacy of chemosensitivity testing and pre-operative chemotherapy against gastric cancer.