Quantitative Studies on Cancer Dissemination¹

This paper describes an approach to estimating in a quantitative way the cancer cells present in blood and tissues of tumor-bearing animals. By using two transplantable tumors of mice, i.e., Ehrlich carcinoma and Sarcoma 180, in the ascites form, a relationship compatible with linearity was observed between the logarithm of cancer cells and either the weight of the tumor or the probit of the percent of tumor take. The number of cells necessary to obtain 50% of takes was considerably different when the cancer cells were included in fragments of different tissues or in the blood clot.

The number of cancer cells present at 7 and 12 days after transplantation in the blood and lung of mice bearing an intracerebral tumor was calculated by using the proposed method.