Growth-inhibiting N-substituted endogenous peptides.

Abstract

Considering the large number of factors that modulate cell growth and differentiation, it might seem naive to assume that cell renewal is basically regulated according to a negative feedback principle, involving one tissue-specific chemical signal system in each organ/tissue. This concept is, nevertheless, about 60 years old. In 1937, Simms and Stillman found that some heat-labile factor, extracted from aorta, inhibited growth of tissue from chicken aorta. Twenty years later, Weiss and Kavanau (1957) formulated a broader hypothesis based on their own data, suggesting that differentiated cells in a tissue or organ generate an inhibitory signal that regulates the rate of cell division in the “proliferative pool” of that same tissue or organ, possibly also stimulating differentiation. Their work was continued by Iversen (1961) and Iversen and Evensen (1962), who analyzed epidermal cell kinetics during skin carcinogenesis, and Bullough (1962), who worked with epidermal regeneration after wounding. Bullough coined the name chalone, a name that was rapidly used for any growth-inhibitory activity that could be found in tissue/organ extracts, most of them more or less crude.KeywordsInhibitory PeptideEhrlich Ascites Tumor CellEhrlich Ascites Carcinoma CellEpidermal ChaloneEpidermal Cell ProliferationThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.