Natural cytotoxicity of haemopoietic cell populations against murine lymphoid tumours.

Homozygous nude and normal mice of 3 strains, BALB/c, CBA and C57BL, were used as sources of nucleated haemopoietic "natural killer" (NK) cells. These killer cells could lyse a wide range of syngeneic and allogeneic lymphoid tumour cell lines in vitro, and it was found that cell suspensions from nude mice were always significantly more active than those from normal mice, and that the most active effector population was a polymorph-enriched peritoneal-exudate cell suspension. Eosinophils did not appear to be involved in the phenomenon, and mononuclear peritoneal-exudate cell suspensions were actually highly inhibitory. Three non-lymphoid tumours, a carcinoma, a fibrosarcoma and a mastocytoma, were totally resistant to in vitro lysis. Although all susceptible tumour cell lines were C-type virus-associated, not all of these tumours were killed by all strain sources of spleen cells, indicating a specificity of killing.