Toxicity of intrapleural Bacillus Calmette-Guérin treatment in animals.

The toxicity of intrapleural Tice strain Bacillus Calmette-Guérin (BCG) infection was tested in hamsters. Doses above 10(6) colony-forming units caused significant systemic infection, which could be controlled with conventional antituberculosis therapy. Living BCG in the pleural space did not prevent the healing of bronchial or vascular closures after pulmonary resection. Prophylactic intrapleural BCG (10(6) colony-forming units) significantly reduced tumor growth in the lungs of mice following i.v. injection of 5 x 10(5) syngeneic sarcoma cells. These animal experiments suggest that intrapleural BCG may be administered in the pleural space after lung resection in limited doses if followed by a complementary course of antimicrobial therapy.

Adaptation of an automatic bacterial colony counter for measuring lung tumor growth in mice.

Adaptation of an automatic bacterial colony counter proved to be an efficient procedure for detecting and quantitating tumor growth in mouse lungs prepared by the Wexler method of India ink insufflation. After correlation of the size discriminator settings on the automatic counter with the Wexler visual scale, the amount of tumor growth in the lungs of 52 mice was determined by eye and independently by the automatic counter. There was no statistical difference between the two procedures. When the mouse lungs were grouped according to the number of tumors computed by eye, there was no statistical difference between the two counting procedures in any of the groups. The standard deviation was independent of the number of tumors in the lungs. This caused the precision of the automatic counter to be poor in lungs with few tumors because the error was a greater percentage of the total. In lungs with a large number of tumors, which were difficult to count by eye, close agreement between the two methods of counting was demonstrated.