Current Status and Perspective of Natural Killer Cell Research

Spleen Natural Killer Cell Activity in Mice Implanted with Allogeneic Fibroblast-Like Tumour Cells following in vivo Exposure to β-Interferon, Interleukin-1 or Indomethacin

“…Our data can be considered in relation to others concerning the role of the NK cell bar rier against several invasive processes by tu mours [2,4,8,9,11], In our model, the treat ment of animals with P-IF led to a diminu tion of tumour size and to an increase of the NK cytotoxicity levels, both when the expo sure preceded and when it followed the tu mour cell implantation. This proves once again the strong immunostimulating effect exerted by fibroblast-originating interferons, as noted by other authors [12-15, 18,22,23, 25, 27], However, it must be pointed out that there are some clinical trials which show a lack of correlation between interferon-in duced enhancement of NK cell activity and the evolution of several tumours in man, fol lowing interferon administration [17],…”

“…As is well known, great significance is cur rently attached to the idea of natural cyto toxicity in tumour surveillance, as expressed chiefly by the natural killer (NK) cell activity [1][2][3][4][5][6][7][8][9][10][11], On the other hand, there are a great deal of data concerning the NK cell modula tion by several substances, especially by beta-interferon (P-IF) [12][13][14][15][16][17][18][19][20][21][22][23][24][25][26][27], but also by interleukin-1 (IL-1) [28,29] or by several prostaglandin inhibitors [30],…”