Summary Serum-free supernatants from in vitro maintained gastrointestinal cancer and melanoma cell lines inhibit the generation of lymphokine (IL-2) activated killer (LAK) Lafreniere et al., 1985;Mule et al., 1986b;Rosenberg et al., 1986). Unfortunately this experience is not paralleled by the clinical application of such an approach where some 60% of patients with metastatic disease fail to respond to this therapy West et al., 1987;Topalian et al., 1988). Similarly, treatment with IL-2 alone appears to be ineffective (Lotze et al., 1986) despite the fact that many human tumours are infiltrated by host mononuclear cells which might become cytotoxic following exposure to IL-2 in vivo (Svennevig et al., 1984;Cozzolino et al., 1986).Prompted by the observations that both IL-2 production and LAK cell generation were impaired with patients with tumours which had extended beyond local confines (Monson et al., 1986(Monson et al., , 1987, we have previously shown that the presence of low numbers of some cell-line derived tumour cells was found to potently inhibit LAK cell generation in vitro (Guillou et al., 1989). A number of reports have demonstrated that supernatants derived from tumour cell lines can inhibit lymphocyte proliferation and cytokine production (Werkmeister et al., 1980; Meischner et al., 1986;Ebert et al., 1987;Pommier et al., 1987;Farram et al., 1982;Hersey et al., 1983). However, the effects of these supernatants on the generation of cytotoxic responses has rarely been examined (Cozzolino et al., 1987