Intracellular serum proteins in cerebral gliomas and metastatic tumours: an immunoperoxidase study.

An immunoperoxidase technique was used to compare the presence of serum proteins in tumour cells in twenty cerebral gliomas and four intracerebral metastatic carcinomas, with the serum protein content of reactive astrocytes around four cerebral infarcts. Rabbit antiserum to human immunoglobulins and albumen was applied to paraffin sections of tumour biopsies and of infarcts from postmortem brains. All the reactive astrocytes surrounding infarcts stained positively for immunoglobulins and albumen. In the gliomas, a continuous range of staining was observed in plump astrocytic tumour cells varying from strongly positive to unstained. Very few poorly-differentiated glioma cells stained for serum proteins; metastatic tumour cells, areas of capillary endothelial proliferation, and spindle cells in gliosarcomas remained unstained. These results suggest that the astrocytic function of serum protein uptake from the extracellular fluid is often lost in poorly-differentiated glioma cells, but is retained to a variable degree by those tumour cells which histologically resemble reactive astrocytes.