Tumor cytotoxicity and interleukin 1 production of blood monocytes of lung cancer patients

Abstract

The effects of lung cancer on the abilities of blood monocytes to produce interleukin-1 and to mediate antitumor activity were examined. The functional integrity of blood monocytes was determined by their capacity to respond in vitro to a variety of activating agents and become tumoricidal, as assessed by a radioactive release assay and ability to produce interleukin-1 in vitro. The results show that the presence of lung cancer significantly increased the number of harvested blood monocytes and that the spontaneous tumoricidal activity of these monocytes was slightly high as compared to monocytes obtained from healthy donors. The production of interleukin-1 by monocytes of healthy donors and lung cancer patients was similar. Blood monocytes obtained from lung cancer patients were less cytotoxic against allogeneic A375 melanoma cells as compared with those of healthy donors subsequent to incubation with a soluble muramyl dipeptide analog or lipopolysaccharide, but were as tumoricidal as those from healthy donors when activated with lipophilic muramyl tripeptide (MTP-PE) entrapped in multilamellar liposomes. The finding that monocytes of patients with lung cancer can respond to MTP-PE encapsulated in liposomes, recommends the use of these liposomes in therapy of human lung cancer.

Production of interleukin-1 and tumour necrosis factor in non-Hodgkin's lymphoma patients

“…The production of IL-1 and TNF in cancer patients has been reported to be defective in some cancers [11,15,31] as well as comparable or increased in others [1,13,28,29]. According to our results (Table 1), unstimulated monocytes from patients of both the groups showed a slightly higher level of IL-1 activity than normal donors which was not found to be significant.…”

Liposomal Muramyl Tripeptide Phosphatidylethanolamine: Targeting and Activating Macrophages for Adjuvant Treatment of Osteosarcoma

“…In vitro-treated human monocytes killed allogeneic and autologous tumors (including melanoma, ovarian, colon, and renal carcinoma [7,[18][19][20]), but had no by-stander toxicity towards normal cells, even when mixed with the tumor targets [4,21]. Importantly, several of these studies showed that monocytes from cancer patients could be activated to similar levels of tumoricidal activity as cells from healthy donors [7,[18][19][20].…”

Chimeric and humanized anti-HM1.24 antibodies mediate antibody-dependent cellular cytotoxicity against lung cancer cells

“…Our study confirmed that NK cells played a major role in the mechanism of anti-tumor activity of anti-HM1.24 mAb. Although NK activity is quite important for host defense against cancers, decreased NK activity [25,26] and monocyte functions [27,28] were reported in lung cancer patients. In our study, NK activity in patients with lung cancer tended to be reduced as compared with that in healthy donors, although the difference was not statistically significant.…”