The effect of recovery from potentially lethal damage on the determination of repair and repopulation in a murine tumour.

Repair and repopulation following X irradiation of clamped-off murine anaplastic MT tumours was investigated using the established method of (Dn-D1)/(n-1). Repair was complete in 4 h, similar in extent to that reported in other tumours, and within the range of that reported for normal tissues. Subsequent repopulation commenced after 4 days and was equivalent to 1.8 Gy/day recovered dose, corresponding to a clonogenic cell number doubling time of 1.8 days. However, estimates of repair and repopulation may have been in error because the chronically hypoxic cells in this tumour alone have the ability to recover from potentially lethal damage (PLD) and so are more radioresistant than cells rendered acutely hypoxic by clamping. Because of this, even clamping off tumours at irradiation does not render all cell populations equally radioresistant, and so reoxygenation between fractions could result in an underestimate of repair and repopulation. Further, the differing sensitivity between acutely and chronically hypoxic cells renders the apparent OER a function of dose (i.e., oxygen not truly dose-modifying to chronically hypoxic cells). Consequently it is incorrect to assume a constant OER in order to compare repair in tumours irradiated under hypoxic conditions with that in normal tissues irradiated under aerobic conditions. It will be argued here that in the case of the present tumour neither reoxygenation nor the choice of OER will have qualitatively altered the conclusion reached from the conventional method.