Detection of doxorubicin, cisplatin and therapeutic antibodies in formalin-fixed paraffin-embedded human cancer cells

A major limitation in the pharmacological treatment of clinically detectable primary cancers and their metastases is their limited accessibility to anti-cancer drugs (cytostatics, inhibitory antibodies, small-molecule inhibitors) critically impairing therapeutic efficacies. Investigations on the tissue distribution of such drugs are rare and have only been based on fresh frozen material or methanol-fixed cell culture cells so far. In this paper, we expand the detection of cisplatin-induced DNA adducts and anthracyclines as well as therapeutic antibodies to routinely prepared formalin-fixed, paraffin-embedded sections (FFPE). Using pre-treated cell lines prepared as FFPE samples comparable to tissues from routine analysis, we demonstrate that our method allows for the detection of chemotherapeutics (anthracyclines by autofluorescence, cisplatin by immune detection of DNA adducts) as well as therapeutic antibodies. This methodology thus allows for analyzing archival FFPE tissues, as demonstrated here for the detection of cisplatin, doxorubicin and trastuzumab in FFPE sections of tumor xenografts from drug-treated mice. Analyzing human tumor samples, this will lead to new insights into the tissue penetration of drugs.