Interleukin‐2‐stimulated natural killer activity against malignant and benign endometrium

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Abstract
Natural cell-mediated immunity against autologous tumor cells, autologous endometrial epithelium, and allogeneic epi-dermoid carcinoma cell line HeLa was tested in 8 patients with endometrial carcinoma and one patient with endome-irial stromal sarcoma. The average cytotoxicity of unstimu-lated peripheral blood lymphocytes against autologous tumor and HeLa cells was weak but significant. Pretreatment of effector cells for 3–5 days with 300 U/ml recombinant inter-leukin-2 (rIL-2) resulted in increased cytotoxicity against malignant target cells in 7 out of 9 cases. The 2 patients' effector cells which were refractory to rIL-2 could be stimulated to; ppreciable lytic activity against the malignant target cells with a recently described cytokine which induces morphological differentiation of natural killer cells. Benign endometrial cells were weakly sensitive to rIL-2-activated lysis in 2 cases. The precursors of the rIL-2-activated killer cells were mostly CD16-positive and CD3-negative, and co-sedimented with endogenous natural killer cells in discontinuous density gradient centrifugations. These results indicate the rIL-2-activated killer cells have a capacity to distinguish between normal and malignant endometrial cells, and that the precursors of the lytic cells in this system belong to the same subpopulation of lym-phocytes as endogenous natural killer cells. In addition, rIL-2 alone may not in all cases be sufficient for optimal generation of cytotoxicity against malignant cells.

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