The influence of the serum of patients with various malignant tumors on HeLa cell culture was investigated in a simplified replicate tissue culture. In the culture medium containing their sera the cells grew better, less well, or unchanged than the control sera; namely, great differences existed in the growth behavior of HeLa cells in fresh serum of cancer patients. Therefore, the sera were divided into growthpromoting, growth-controlling, and unchanged groups.
The fraction of serum protein was measured, in addition to a series of studies to evaluate the changes in various serum protein during continuous cell cultivation in each group. Between the growth-promoting and the growth-controlling group, there existed little difference in the fraction of serum protein to affect growth of cells in cell culture, and there was found no difference in the capacity of the serum on cell growth between the patients with early cancer and advanced cancer. It was also clarified that the major property of the serum existed in the fraction of albumin.
In addition, the specific action of the patient's serum to the propagation of the cells was studied to learn if this specific action be related to the patient's own resistance to cancer, and also if they can be used for predicting the outcome of patients with cancer. As a result, those individuals whose sera inhibited the growth of the cells in tissue culture had a tendency to show a better survival rate than those whose sera did not, but the difference in the survival rate between the growth-promoting and gowth-controlling group was statistically not significant by the χ
2-test. The importance of the rôle of individual human serum in the growth of cancer is stressed.
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