Studies in Bone Sarcoma: II. Is New Bone Formation in Osteogenic Sarcoma the Result of a Local Supersaturation of Tissue Fluids with Calcium?

Abstract

Some authors, as Nageotte (1), Leriche and Policard (2), Murray (3), and Grieg (4), maintain that bone formation is not the result of direct cell activity hut is a humoral process, occurring when the necessary environs obtain, such as proliferating connective tissue, edema, and supersaturation of the field with calcium. In bone which is the site of an osteosarcoma, absorption of the normal osseous structure takes place to varying degrees no matter how much newly formed bone may be present in the tumor itself. This is the result of osteoclastic activity stimulated by the neoplasm and of direct erosion of bone by the tumor cells themselves. It is conceivable that the tissue fluids in these tumors may contain an excess amount of calcium derived from destruction of normal bone. Since in the tumor there are rapidly growing mesoblastic tumor cells and areas of necrosis with lymphedema, the humoral conditions said to be necessary for bone formation exist. Thus, according to the humoral hypothesis of osteogenesis, as stated by Leriche and Policard (2), new bone formation in osteosarcoma is merely a reprecipitation of calcium absorbed locally by the growing tumor from normal bone (4).

With a transplantable mesoblastic tumor composed of spindle and rounded cells, the former producing collagen, it was possible in the following experiments to study the ability of calcium to stimulate osteogenic properties in neoplastic cells that normally do not exhibit them. In this way the humoral hypothesis for new bone formation in osteosarcoma was tested.