Establishment of cross-resistance profiles for new agents.
Sublines of murine leukemias (L1210 and P388) and solid tumors selected for resistance to representatives of all of the chemical and functional classes of clinically useful anticancer drugs have been isolated and established in serial in vivo passage and, in some cases, in vitro culture. Extensive resistance, cross-resistance, and collateral-sensitivity patterns have been established with most of the sublines of the drug-resistant murine leukemias under treatment with greater than 100 different established and clinically useful anticancer drugs or new candidate anticancer drugs currently under study. Patients selected for inclusion in phase I-II trials usually have tumors that have failed to respond to treatment with established clinically useful drugs, either from the start of treatment or during continuing treatment after initial useful response. These treatment failures are no doubt due, in many cases, to drug-resistant tumors if initially unresponsive or to the overgrowth of drug-resistant mutant tumor stem cells in initially responding patients who ultimately failed under continuing treatment. Therefore, the cross-resistance profiles of drug-resistant murine tumors to treatment with new drugs going into phase I-II trials should provide useful guides for patient selection for those trials. Also, these cross-resistance profiles will provide useful information indicating likely biochemical mechanism of action of new drugs with promising anticancer activity, thus guiding drug selection for combination chemotherapy trials in animals or man. Numerous examples of all of the above indications for useful application of such information derived from chemotherapy trials with drug-resistant murine tumors are reported.