Natural killer (NK) and lymphokine-activated killer (LAK) activities in a patient who recovered from cancer, and the characteristics of LAK cells generated from CD4-CD8- and CD8+ peripheral blood lymphocytes.

The natural killer (NK) and lymphokine-activated killer (LAK) activities of a patient who recovered from bladder transitional cell carcinoma were determined. The patient was diagnosed in 1980 and repeated several therapies until 1986. Since 1987, he has been in a tumor-free state. Recently, very high NK and LAK activities were found. The NK activity was recognized not only against the NK-sensitive cell line K562, but also against NK-unsensitive Raji and Daudi cell lines and against autotumor cell line H41. The percentage of CD16+ in peripheral blood lymphocytes (PBL) was 52.9%, the CD8+CD16+ was 26.3%, and the CD4-CD8-CD16+ was 26.6% (17.5, 5.4 and 12.1% in healthy blood donor (control), respectively). Because the patient had large numbers of CD4-CD8- cells in the PBL, CD4-CD8- LAK were generated from them. The CD4-CD8- LAK cells exhibited extremely high killer activity, whereas the CD8+ LAK cells generated from the CD8+ cells showed a low level of killer activity. These results suggest that the tumor-free condition of this patient may be related to these high killer activities. In this patient, several cytokines were also determined, although the results were not completely interpreted.