Since the advent of chemotherapy, certain types of cancer have been particularly resistant to chemotherapeutic treatment. One of the most well-studied types of resistance is resistance to multiple struc-turally dissimialr hydrophobic chemotherapeutic agents, or multidrug resistance (MDR). We found that MDR cells (KBV20C, KB7D) being highly resistant to colchicine, etoposide, and vincristine were found to have very low level of putrescine and low level of spermidine than the drug sensitive parental cells (KB) but they had almost same level of spermine as the drug sensitive cells. Although both MDR and drug sensitive cells had almost same rate of polyamine uptake, MDR cells were much more sensitive to an inhibitor of polyamine synthesis, methylglyoxal-bis guanylhydrazone (MGBG), suggesting that MDR cells might be defective in polyamine synthesis. These results also suggest that HGBG can be used for treatment of MDR in vivo.