Dose dependence of the growth rate of multicellular tumour spheroids after irradiation.

The present study investigated differences in the growth rate of multicellular tumour spheroids of the MCF-7 line of human breast cancer before and after their irradiation. Growth of the spheroids was analysed according to a model based on a Gompertz function. In this model, normalization to a common initial volume is achieved in a way that enables meaningful comparisons to be made between the results obtained for each spheroid. For irradiated spheroids the model includes an additional term to take account of sterilized cells. We found that the growth rate observed before irradiation is not fully recovered by irradiated spheroids and that growth recovery reduces with higher irradiation doses. Surviving fractions obtained at doses below 3 Gy are comparable with those found in clonogenic assays on spheroids of the same cellular line. At larger doses, discrepancies between the different studies are considerable.