The Effects of Cyclophosphamide on Apoptosis in Murine Lymphoma

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

Whereas apoptosis is a critical mode of cell deletion in normal organism development, apoptotic cells are also obserced in tumor therapy. We therefore investigated the expression of apoptotic cells induced as a function of time and dose in murine A-20 lymphoma treated with cyclophosphamide in vivo, by H&E and TUNEL method. The percent of apoptotic cells were scored from tumor section using TUNEL method. The expression of apoptotic positive cell was determined over a 10-day period following treatment of the mice with 200 mg/kg. Apotosis increased further with time, reaching a peak value between 12∼24 hr (scored 6.7±1.0%∼6.1±0.7%), and then slowly declined to backgroud levels by 10 days after treatment. The dependence of induction of apoptosis on the dose of cyclophoshamide was determined by treatment with 50, 100, or 200 mg/kg at 12 hr after treatment. Apoptosis was dose dependent in that as the dose was increased the percentage of apoptosis increased. However, the increase in apoptosis at the lower dose used (50 mg/kg was higher on a per unit dose basis than that at the higher dose used (200 mg/kg). This result show that the alkylating agent cyclophoshamide strongly induces apoptosis in murine lymphoma.