The role of the spleen in the immunity to a chemically induced sarcoma in C3H mice.

Abstract

Summary The adoptive transfer of immunity to a chemically induced sarcoma was accomplished in a syngeneic murine system by the intraperitoneal administration of spleen cells obtained from mice in which a tumor-bearing limb had previously been amputated. The transfer of spleen cells obtained from nontumor-bearing mice subjected to hind limb amputation failed to increase host resistance to subsequent tumor transplants. The production of antitumor immunity in the recipient mice before a definite temporal relationship to the time interval between amputation of the tumor-bearing limb of the spleen cell donor and the challenge of the spleen cell recipient with viable tumor cells. This temporal relationship remained constant when the interval between amputation and splenectomy was varied and when the interval between spleen cell inoculation and tumor cell challenge was varied. Splenectomy had no effect upon the growth of a primary tumor transplant. However, splenectomy, performed in animals immunuzed by the amputation of a tumor-bearing limb, abolished the immune response to a subsequent tumor cell inoculum. Additional chemically induced tumors must be studied in order to ascertain whether these observations are generally applicable to other chemically induced tumor-host systems.