Treatment with tumor necrosis factor alpha and interferon alpha of a human kidney cancer xenograft in nude mice: evidence for an anticachectic effect of interferon alpha.

Unfortunately the efficacy of the treatment of the metastatic or recurrent renal cell carcinoma (RCC) has not improved during the last few years. Recently effort has been put into the experimental and clinical evaluation of so-called "biological response modifiers" (BRM; cytokines and related peptides) as treatment modalities for RCC. The present results are, however, still disappointing. Since BRM, if applied alone, are largely ineffective as antineoplastic agents, more experimental studies are now necessary to test the antineoplastic value of their combinations, which seem to be more promising. In the present study, the in vivo effect of tumor necrosis factor a (TNF a) and/or interferon a (IFN a) on the macroscopic tumor growth (external caliper measurements of tumor size) and on the cell proliferation (in vivo 3H-thymidine labelling index, LI, and mitotic index, MI) of a human RCC xenograft line in nude mice has been investigated. Neither of these substances alone nor their combination was effective in changing the time course of the tumor sizes and the growth patterns of the treated tumors in a statistically significant manner as compared to the untreated controls. Also the cell kinetic parameters were only marginally affected by these treatments, whereby TNF a alone proved to be more effective than IFN a alone. However, compared to the effect of TNF alpha alone, the combination with IFN alpha leads to some amelioration of the cell kinetic perturbations and also to an appreciable shift in the growth patterns of the tumors from distinct Gompertzian (under TNF alpha alone) to near exponential (under the combination treatment; p < 0.05). As a consequence, the tumors grow more slowly under the combined treatment during the observation time, and on the other hand, their growth does not decelerate as much as under TNF alpha alone. Actually, if tumor growth continues in the same way, the extrapolation of the present data predicts smaller and greater tumors than the control tumors in the TNF alpha and in the combination treatment groups respectively. Notably, in the combination the effect of the IFN alpha seems to predominate. This is also seen in the effect of this combination on the cachexia of these tumor-bearing animals: either alone or in combination with TNF alpha, IFN alpha partially protects the animals from tumor-growth associated weight loss. Although the direct antineoplastic in vivo effect of the present cytokine combination against this human RCC xenograft line is rather limited, the potential antagonizing effect of IFN alpha on the development of cachexia should be further explored.