Importance of Age of Host in Detecting Tumor-Associated Transplantation Antigens

[摘要] We report here the importance of the age of the host in the detection of immunogenic tumor-specific transplantation antigens (TSTA)[3][1] in transplantation experiments in vivo. Demonstration of the presence of TSTA on the K-BALB cell line, a BALB/3T3 cell line transformed by the Kirsten strain of murine sarcoma virus (MSV) but not producing virus, was dependent on the age of the BALB/c mice immunized.Stephenson and Aaronson (1) previously failed to detect tumor-associated transplantation antigens (TATA) on this same cell line when they performed transplantation immunity studies in 6- to 8-week-old BALB/c mice. Their negative conclusion was based, in part, upon observing comparable protection when using K-BALB and the parental BALB cell lines as vaccines. The authors admitted that the BALB/3T3 parental cell line may have undergone antigenic changes concomitant with prolonged passage in vitro Furthermore, we (unpublished observation) and others (2) have found that the putative normal BALB/3T3 cell line is, in fact, weakly tumorigenic. [1]: #fn-3

[学科分类] 生物科学（综合）