A flow cytometric bromodeoxyuridine/DNA analysis for cytokinetics of the pancreatic cancer cell line Capan-2 after irradiation.

The cytokinetics of the human pancreatic adenocarcinoma cell line Capan-2 were analyzed by a bromodeoxyuridine (BrdUrd)/DNA analysis with flow cytometry (FCM). The reproducibility of data was shown to be superior to that achieved using a DNA analysis program with FCM. The perturbation of cytokinetics following irradiation was examined. Bivariate distribution was able to distinguish each cell phase cohort, even following as strong an irradiation as 10 Gy, a condition for which DNA analysis proved unusable. BrdUrd/DNA analysis showed the G2M phase population after irradiation with 2 Gy to be significantly greater (P < 0.005) than that of the untreated cells. This difference was not detectable by the DNA analysis program due to the large standard deviation (SD) of the data. BrdUrd/DNA analysis has a sufficient quantitative accuracy that strongly perturbed cytokinetics in patients treated with various therapeutic agents, for example, with combined therapies, can thus be analyzed by this approach.