Patent ID: 7588903

Claim:
A method of determining an order of administration of a plurality of chemo-therapeutic drugs for killing cancerous cells to reduce the induction of drug cross-resistance in a patient, comprising the steps of: (a) providing a panel of cell strains obtained from the same tumor type as said cancerous cells, said panel comprising a parental strain sensitive to all of said drugs and two or more progeny strains each being resistant to a separate one of said chemotherapeutic drugs; (b) assessing the sensitivity of each of said progeny strains to each of said drugs relative to the drug-sensitive parental strain to thereby determine the extent of resistance of each of said strains to each of said drugs; (c) determining said order of administering said drugs using said sensitivity information, wherein the drug which corresponds to the strain which demonstrates the least resistance to the others of said drugs is determined to be the first to be administered while any other drug which corresponds to a strain which demonstrates a greater cross-resistance is assigned a value as a subsequent drug to be administered.