Proliferative Parameters Relevant to Cancer Therapy

Abstract

It is becoming increasingly widely accepted that besides a better knowledge of the in-vivo pharmacokinetics and of the effective tissue concentrations of therapeutic agents, reliable data on the proliferative properties of both neoplastic tissues and critical normal cell systems (i.e. stem cells of the bone marrow and intestinal epithelium, and the cell populations involved in the immune response) may be indispensable for the design of more rational schemes of tumor therapy. The steady growth of the body of information on the proliferative characteristics of mammalian cell systems during past years has supported and given direction to this trend. However, the initial rapid advances in this field have also uncovered new and unexpected difficulties, whose solution will require new efforts on both the conceptual and the methodological side (6, 13–15, 21, 25).

Supported by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft as part of the research programme of the Forschergruppe “Biochemische und Immunologische Grundlagen der Leukämie- und Tumortherapie” (Tübingen).