Immune complexes in human malignant tumours. A review.

This paper is a review on immune complexes in malignant tumours. High levels of immune complexes have been detected in the serum of patients with malignant solid tumours, leukemias and lymphomas. These studies were performed using non-specific methods. Results obtained by different laboratories are in general coincident; elevated levels of immune complexes in pre-treatment samples and in recurrent disease and, normal values in post-treatment studies indicating a disease free state. Nevertheless, there are certain variations among the results obtained by different techniques suggesting the necessity to check various methods for each tumour type. Although there is no clear evidence that immune complexes in cancer patients contain tumor related products, the current status of clinical research suggests the potential of circulating immune complexes assays for monitoring malignant diseases.