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The Cytotoxicity of Serum for Mouse Mammary Cancer Cells

I. The Effects of Admixture in Vitro upon Homoiotransplantability^*

David T. Imagawa, Jerome T. Syverton and John J. Bittner

( Department of Bacteriology and Immunology and the Division of Cancer Biology, Department of Physiology, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, Minn.)

Samples of antiserum representative of malignant and normal tissues known to contain the mammary tumor virus were tested for cytotoxic activity by admixture in vitro with cellular antigens. The samples of antiserum which had been prepared in guinea pigs by employing as the antigen tissues known to contain the mammary tumor agent were found to inactivate mammary cancer cells on incubation in vitro, whereas samples of antiserum representative of tissues lacking the virus had limited inhibitory effect in the experiments reported herein. The elimination by repeated absorption of the antigenic components which were possessed in common by normal cells and by cancer cells from the same host species was without apparent effect upon the specificity of the cytotoxic antiserum. The samples of normal serum and of antiserum from rabbits consistently showed an inhibitory effect upon cancer cells. Contrariwise, sera from normal chickens and guinea pigs did not exert an inhibitory or cytotoxic effect. The inhibitory effect of rabbit serum resulted from a naturally occurring inhibitor which was interpreted as supplementary to the cytotoxic effect of anticancer cell rabbit serum.

^* This investigation was supported by a grant from the National Cancer Institute of the National Institutes of Health, Public Health Service, and the American Cancer Society upon recommendation by the Committee on Growth of the National Research Council.

Present address: Departments of Infectious Diseases and Pediatrics, University of California, School of Medicine, Los Angeles 24, Calif.

Received 1/30/53.