抄録
Inflammation is the succession of changes of a living tissue to injury and to the cause of injury, which can be regarded as host's defensive reaction and repairing process of the injured tissue. On the other hand, cancer represents a pathologic disturbance of growth characterized by an excessive and unceasing proliferation of cells. It is assumed that when progressive growth of tumor injures the normal tissue active host's defensive reaction against the tumor itself and subsequent injury may be expressed locally as inflammatory response.
Our previous experiments with the autochthonous tumor system of the rat showed clearly that the intensity of the lymphocyte infiltration in the tumor tissue correlates with the tumor specific immune resistance. On the basis of the results, lymphocyte subpopulations and subsets infiltrating in various human cancer tissues were identified with antihuman lymphocyte monoclonal antibodies. It was demonstrated that the grade of lymphocyte infiltration, especially of T cells, in cancer tissue correlates with clinical prognosis. Furthermore, we performed functional analysis of tumor infiltrating cells in rat syngeneic tumor-host system. Various tumor infiltrating cells were shown to play an important role in eradicating the transplanted tumor. Killer/suppressor T cells were demonstrated to be the final effector cells recognizing specifically the target tumor cells. Thus the inflammatory response at the site of tumor can be regarded as the manifestation of host resistance against the tumor.
