Fig. 3

Ex vivo drug sensitivity testing of patient resections. a Sample processing pipeline for sSMR measurement with active loading. Tumor cells were isolated from patient resection specimens using established protocols¹² (see Methods, Supplementary Note 7) for dissociation into single-cell suspension and allowed to recover for at least 24 h before the addition of drug or vehicle control. On subsequent days, the buoyant mass and MAR were measured for both the control and drug-treated fractions. b Tukey's box plot showing the buoyant mass measurements for primary biopsies of different brain lesions. From left to right, number of cells measured: n = 86, 90, 63, 64, 66, 83, 74, 60, 47, 53, 54, 164, and 188. c Tukey's box plot showing mass-normalized MAR values from the same primary tissue samples shown in b. Statistically significant reductions in MAR per mass (*p < 0.05 in highlighted segments) were observed for the recurrent glioblastoma treated with 1 μM abemaciclib for 72 h (p = 0.032), breast metastasis treated with 100 nM abemaciclib (p = 0.029), and lung metastasis treated with 100 μM carboplatin (p = 0.025). All other drug-control comparisons did not show a statistically significant response. Additional information about the handling of each primary sample can be found in Supplementary Note 7 and exact p values can be found in Supplementary Notes 9–14. For both b, c, the center line shows median value, hinges represent the first and third quartiles, and whiskers extend to the furthest value <1.5× IQR from hinge