ABSTRACT
A major obstacles to evaluation of newly-developed treatment strategy for human lung cancer has been the lack of appropriate experimental animal models. We describe a new experimental model of orthotopically-developed non-small cell lung cancer in nude rat, involving inoculation of tumor cell suspension by thoracotomy. Over 40 direct implantation to the periphery of the lung has been performed to date, each requiring less than 1 hour for completion. This model has been used to perform a series of experiments to investigate whether the rat lung and surrounding structures trapped tumor cells with 2 different non-small cell lung cancer cell lines(NCI-H460 and NCI-H1299). Every animal showed development of tumor masses, which were loculated at the periphery of the lung paren- chyma and identified also by radiography. After 3 weeks of the inoculation, tumor develop ment at the mediastinal strutures were identified. The life expectancies of the victims were different between the cell lines, but were approximately 5 weeks when NCI-H460 cell line was used. This new orthotopic lung cancer model may be facilitate future studies of the new therapeutics of localized non-small cell lung cancer .