The transmission of the rous filterable agent to chemically induced tumours / by Edward Mellanby.

  • Edward Mellanby
Date:
[1938?]
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: The transmission of the rous filterable agent to chemically induced tumours / by Edward Mellanby. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    6i6—006 : 616—022 . 6 THE TRANSMISSION OF THE ROUS FILTERABLE AGENT TO CHEMICALLY INDUCED TUMOURS. Edward Mellanby. Field Laboratory, University of Sheffield. (Plate XLVII.) In the Report of the British Empire Cancer Campaign for 1934 I referred to experiments in which it had proved impossible to show the presence of a filter-passing agent in cancerous growths of fowls induced by dibenzanthracene and tar. This result was not in agree¬ ment with that previously published by McIntosh (1933), who demonstrated the presence in tar-induced tumours of a filterable agent comparable to the well known agent of the Rous and other bird tumours. I pointed out that if chemically induced tumours in fowls contain a filterable active agent, it appeared to be excep¬ tional and not the rule. In 1928 Sturm and Murphy had also failed to obtain any evidence of the presence of a filterable active agent in tar tumours of fowls. The suggestion has been made that the positive results obtained by McIntosh may have been due to the fact that some of the birds he used carried in their tissues an, infective agent of the bird leukaemia type at the time they were bearing the tar tumours, and that it was this adventitious agent which really stimulated the formation of new tumours and not the specific product of the tar tumours. Even on the basis of this explanation the subject seemed of interest. I proceeded, therefore, to see whether the carcinogenic agent produced in a Rous sarcoma could pass to a chemically induced tumour in the same bird, and if so, whether the cancerous growths resulting from such a filterable agent would simulate the chemically induced or the Rous sarcoma as regards structure and metabolic activity. In the Report of the British Empire Cancer Campaign for 1935 I gave a resume of the results obtained. It was then stated that in the case of birds bearing at the same time both dibenzanthracene and Rous tumours, cell-free filtrates made from the dibenzanthracene tumours and injected into fowls resulted in new tumours and that these, both structurally and according to metabolic tests, had the properties of a Rous sarcoma and not of the original dibenzanthracene tumour.
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