Lethal effect of adriamycin on the division cycle of HeLa cells.

Abstract

Summary Adriamycin, a new antitumor antibiotic in the anthracycline group, promptly inhibits DNA and RNA synthesis and arrests cell division. The cell viability (defined as the capacity of a single cell to grow out into a macroscopic clone) is reduced sharply following exposure to adriamycin, 0.1 eg/ml, for a fractional period of the generation time. With the use of a synchronous population of HeLa cells, it is shown that the maximum loss in cell viability takes place when exposure to adriamycin occurs during the DNA-synthetic phase (S). The relative dose-response curves of HeLa cells exposed to either adriamycin or daunomycin show that daunomycin is significantly more effective in reducing the cell viability than is adriamycin on a molar basis.