Although widely used in the treatment of common cancers, paclitaxel causes angialgia/ phlebitis in 60-70% of patients when administered intravenously to the upper extremities. However, useful laboratory models for the study of angialgia and phlebitis are currently lacking. The purpose of this study was to establish a new application of the real-time cellmonitoring analysis (RTCA) system to detect responses of human umbilical vein endothelial cells (HUVECs) to paclitaxel. We examined the

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... ity of applying this method to detect the risk of developing angialgia/phlebitis as a side effect of anticancer reagents. HUVECs were seeded onto an E-plate. After 24 h of culture, paclitaxel and carboplatin were added to each well and changes in electrical impedance were then recorded for 72 h. Electrical impedance, outputted as cell index (CI) values, enabled the time-dependent monitoring of the effects of chemotherapeutics on HUVEC viability. Paclitaxel caused a greater concentration-and timedependent decrease in HUVEC CI values than with carboplatin. These findings agree with clinical case data showing that taxanes cause angialgia/phlebitis more frequently than platinum therapies. Furthermore, CI values correlated with increased levels of the inflammatory markers intercellular adhesion molecule-1 (ICAM-1), vascular cell adhesion molecule-1 (VCAM-1), and phospho-nuclear factor (P-NF)-κB. Together, these data suggest that our RTCA-based experimental method provides a useful in vitro model for the study of chemotherapy-induced angialgia/phlebitis.