MORPHOMETRIC STUDIES ON TREATED AND UNTREATED HETEROTRANSPLANTED MALIGNANT-TUMORS

Short-term therapy effects on heterotransplanted tumours are important to know in order to study the action of anticancer treatment. They ar e, however, difficult to assess due to interference from such factors as edema, vascular swelling and necrosis. Non-invasive methods such as NMR can be of some use, but the applicability is limited since backgr ound noise from the host animal organism may confound measurements. We studied a series of Cisplatine-treated bladder carcinomas heterotrans planted to nude mice and their untreated controls in order to illustra te short-term chemoterapy effect. We applied simple unbiased morphomet ric methods on formalin-fixed and paraffin-embedded material in order to obtain an unbiased estimate of the volume of the whole tumour and t he volume of vital tumour tissue on day 1 and day 3 after treatment, a t which time no gross changes in tumour size were evident. Furthermore , we estimated the number of tumour cells in the tumours. The estimate was based on measurement of the mean nuclear volume and the nuclear v olume fraction in combination with the measured volume of vital tissue in the tumour. The pronounced therapy effects seen in this experiment al system may be of potential interest in monitoring effects at the cl inic.