Abstract
Since the first papers by Maral (1) and Serpick (2) in 1967 concerning the toxicity and cardiotoxicity of rubidomycin and daunomycin (DNR), an enormous amount of work has been done in practically all laboratory animal species to induce and study the cardiotoxic effects of the anthracycline antibiotics. Researchers have used in vitro and invivo toxicological, pharmacological, and biochemical methods. Here, therefore, only the main aspects most closely related to the problems of screening anthracycline antibiotics for cardiotoxicity will be discussed. I apologize to anyone whose contributions are inadvertently omitted or if same topics are considered in haste. Many authors have proposed experimental models to assess the cardiotoxicity of these drugs; selected items from some of these models and from other published data are listed in Table 1.