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STUDIES ON THE EFFECTS OF ACTINOMYCETES PRODUCTS ON THE CULTURE OF HUMAN CARCINOMA CELLS (STRAIN HELA) I. THE EFFECT OF KNOWN ANTIBIOTICS HAVING NO OR SLIGHT TUMOR-INHIBITORY ACTIVITY ON HELA CELLS

1957; National Institute of Infectious Diseases; Volume: 10; Issue: 5 Linguagem: Inglês

10.7883/yoken1952.10.277

1884-2828

Kazuo Nitta,

Microbial Natural Products and Biosynthesis

Recently studies on antitumor substances have made remarkable progress. In the field of antibiotics systematic studies have been made by Umezawa and others (1953), with the intention of searching for new antitumor antibiotics. With the development of the studies, establishment of new methods to test the antitumor activity has become greatly important. The test methods for the antitumor activity can be divided into in vivo and in vitro methods. As the latter methods there are those using tissue culture of tumor cells and those to test the effect on tumor cells placed in the media in which they can not be successively cultured. In the tissue culture method the effect on the growing tumor cells can be tested, and moreover, as noticed by Pomerat (1951), it has the following advantages: relatively low cost, rapid performance, quick results, genetic homogeneity, etc. On the other hand, since strain HeLa is one of human carcinomas and known to be stable, and its culture, as mentioned by Scherer and others (1953), has many advantages, the utilization of this strain for the study of antitumor substances is considered to be significant. From these points of view, the present author has employed the tissue culture of strain HeLa for the test of the antitumor activity. As the first step, he investigated the responses of HeLa to known antibiotics and synthetic substances and ascertained the culture to be available for the assay of antitumor substances. Furthermore, for the purpose of discovering new tumor-inhibitory antibiotics, the author has practically applied the culture of strain HeLa to the screening of cultured broths of actinomycetes and to the pursuing of the process of extraction and purification of new antitumor antibiotics. These serial investigations will be described in the following papers.In the present study known antibiotics having no or slight antitumor activity were tested for the effects on growing HeLa cells. In general, the anti-HeLa activity of tumor-noninhibitory antibiotics was considerably weak and, on the contrary, that of slightly tumor-inhibitory ones showed passable intensities.