HILL, R. P., AND BUSH, R. S. A New Method of Determining the Fraction of Hypoxic Cells in a Transplantable Murine Sarcoma. Radiat. Res. 70, 141-153 (1977). Combined nitrogen mustard and radiation treatments of the KHT sarcoma in vivo have indicated that a certain dose of nitrogen mustard can kill all the oxygenated cells in the tumor while killing few, if any, of the hypoxic cells. This finding has allowed nitrogen mustard treatment to be used as a way of selectively removing the oxygenated cells in the tumor so that the radiation response of the hypoxic cells can be studied directly. Using this nitrogen mustard technique the hypoxic fraction is found to be 0.30 as compared to a value of 0.13 obtained using the more conventional technique of comparing anoxic and air-breathing survival data following the same dose of radiation. Also, chronically hypoxic cells have been found to have a smaller shoulder on their radiation survival curve than acutely hypoxic cells.
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Hill et al. (1977) studied this question.