The 1990s saw a renaissance of the concept of individualized chemotherapy in oncology, markedly stimulated by the development of in vitro chemosensitivity assays. The clinical utility of drug response assays has been evaluated in clinical trials and the results suggest that assay-assisted therapy selection may improve survival as well as economic outcomes. This volume comprises the proceedings of the first Symposium of the International Society for Chemosensitivity Testing in Oncology, ISCO-1, held in Homburg/Saar, Germany, in September 2001. The topics include: in vitro drug-testing methods,...

Over the past 50 years many in vitro and in vivo drug response assay systems have been developed to determine the potential - tivity of chemotherapy agents. The idea was to eliminate ineffective agents and unnecessary toxic treatment while selecting drugs active in vitro or in the mouse model that might increase the probability of response in the patient. None of these test models, however, achieved routine clinical application in the past. This might be at least in part - lated to large discrepancies that were described between the s- cess rate of the assay systems and the clinical benefit...