Human hematopoietic tumors in nude mice.

Despite the difficulty in establishing human hematopoietic tumors in nude mice, four human lymphomas were successfully heterotransplanted and passaged serially in our laboratory. Additional immunosuppression with chemotherapy, whole-body radiation or splenectomy was not required for establishment of these tumors. All four of these tumors were of the non-Hodgkin's lymphoma type. In each case the tumors in the nude mice were histologically identical to the biopsy specimens from the patient in whom they were derived. Attempts to transplant tumor from 17 patients with Hodgkin's disease or 4 patients with immunoblastic lymphadenopathy were unsuccessful. Tumors from 2 patients with chronic myelogenous leukemia and 1 with hairy cell leukemia could be grown in nude mice conditioned with whole-body radiation or cytosine arabinoside, but these tumors could not be passaged to other nude mice. Cell surface markers were determined on the four serially passaged lymphomas. These surface markers were similar to the markers on the original tumors, even after long periods of mouse-to-mouse passage. In 1 patient with fevers, night sweats and mediastinal mass in whom a diagnosis had not been made after several biopsies, examination of tumor tissue that had been transplanted from the patient to the nude mouse clearly established the diagnosis of lymphoma.