Cellular aspects of tumor therapy.

Abstract

A question which must often be considered when attempts are made to apply laboratory findings to medical problems is: Are the end-points used in the research problem directly applicable to the practical problem, and to what extent? Fortunately, research in the field of cellular radiobiology often can be directly applied to problems in radiation therapy because a criterion of effect commonly used by the cellular radiobiologist, i.e., inhibition of proliferative ability, is also the end-point of concern to the therapist. Although a considerable literature exists on the lethal effects of radiation on microorganisms, it has been only during the last few years that new tissue culture technics have afforded similar quantitative studies with mammalian cells. The early experiments of Rous and Jones (1), followed by the improvements of Puck et al. (2), permit, in essence, evaluation of the proliferative capacity of single cells as determined by ability to grow into visible colonies. One of the principal problems i...