Correlation of growth of tumours in NC-cell-depleted mice with NC- and NK-cell-mediated lysis in vitro

✍ Scribed by Y. Cheng Smart; Margaret L. Farrelly; Robert C. Burton

• Publisher: John Wiley and Sons
• Year: 1992
• Tongue: French
• Weight: 574 KB
• Volume: 50
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 0020-7136
• DOI: 10.1002/ijc.2910500526

✦ Synopsis

Abstract

The anti‐tumour surveillance activity of natural cytotoxic (NC) cells was studied in vivo using the transplantable tumours WEHI‐164 fibrosarcoma, MPC‐11 plasmacytoma, WEHI‐7 T‐lymphoma, B16 melanoma and EL‐4 thymoma in syngeneic and semi‐allogeneic mice. Experimentally, mice were treated with the anti‐NC‐1.1 monoclonal antibody (MAb) 1C4 to abrogate splenic NC activity. This was followed by s.c. inoculation of MTD~100~ doses of the tumours. Comparison of the diameters of the tumours in the anti‐NC‐1.1 ‐treated mice with control mice using non‐parametric statistics showed significantly faster growth of WEHI‐164 (p < 0.01), MPC‐11 (p < 0.05) and WEHI‐7 (p < 0.05) when the mean tumour diameters were < 15mm in the anti‐NC‐1.1 ‐treated mice. Significantly faster growth was also observed in anti‐NC‐1.1 ‐treated mice with the B16 tumour (p < 0.05), but at a later stage of growth, when the tumour diameter was > 15 mm. In vitro, WEHI‐164, MPC‐11 and WEHI‐7 were shown to be predominantly sensitive to lysis by mouse splenic NC cells, while B16 was predominantly lysed by splenic natural‐killer (NK) cells. Anti‐NC‐1.1 treatment of mice did not affect the growth of EL‐4 in vivo and in vitro experiments with anti‐NK‐1.1 and anti‐NC‐1.1 MAb indicated that this tumour was lysed by sub‐sets of NK and NC cells distinct from those which lysed the other tumours. We conclude that, in mice at least, NC cells have an in vivo role in controlling the growth of some transplantable tumours, and this correlates with the in vitro NC cell lysis of these same tumours.