Autologous transplantation of enzymatically prepared and freeze-preserved human tumors

STUDY OF TRANSPLANTABLE ANIMAL TU-T mors in inbred animal strains has yielded a great deal of information in virtually every phase of cancer research.Many of the observations made on the behavior of transplantable rodent tumors are, however, not directly applicable to human situations because of species differences and because of the peculiar behavior of serially transplantable tumors.13~20Human tumors have been studied in conditioned hosts and in specially selected hosts.*,11, 25 Although these transplanted human tumors are valuable, particularly in chemotherapy studies,lZ heterologous transplantation represents a highly artificial situation.Transplantations of cultured human cancer cells into humans are sometimes successful,l6, 21-23 however, the usual difficulties of homotransplantation makes such experiments of limited usefulness.Autologous transplantation of human tumors, although not always successful, represents the closest experimental approximation to spontaneous metastasis and has recently come under study in a few centers.Southam reviewed older literature on this subject 21, z2 and studied the quantitative aspects of autotransplantation in humans.The striking findings of his studies were the difficulty of such transplantation and the large numbers of cancer cells required to produce successful transplants.The experiences of other authorsQp 18824 confirm this relative difficulty of autotransplantation.Unlike most transplantable rodent tumors,