Monitoring the side effects with DSC caused by cyclophosphamide treatment

Abstract

AbstractPolyneuropathy is defined as a simultaneous malfunction of several peripheral nerves, which could be a side effect of a cancer therapy (using cyclophosphamide) as well. In the daily use, it is very important to know the kinetics and metabolism of anticancer drugs because this way we can estimate their undesirable consequences to avoid the unwanted complications. Nowadays, the application of DSC in diagnosis of different diseases using blood compounds is increasing; therefore, the purpose of recent study was to introduce at the first time the DSC in the detection of cyclophosphamide-induced changes in plasma and red blood cells in case of an experimental animal model. Guinea pigs (Cavia porcellus, n = 60, in 12 different groups) underwent to cyclophosphamide treatment administrated intraperitoneally with the dose comparable to the human dosage. At the end of treatments, the animals were euthanized, and the experimental samples (plasma end red blood cells) were analyzed by a SETARAM Micro DSC-II calorimeter. The denaturation temperatures and the calorimetric enthalpies were calculated from the heat flow curves. Our results exhibited a dose-dependent difference between thermal parameters of untreated and treated samples, demonstrating that DSC is applicable in this field too. After deconvolution of DSC scans, the changes could be assigned to the attacked compounds. Recently published papers call the attention for this technique more frequently in the medical diagnosis because this way from small amount of sample very quickly and economically possible to detect and predict the expected and unwanted side effects of chemotherapeutic agents.