Secretory component in human mammary carcinoma.

Since secretory component is thought to be a normal glandular epithelial cell product, surgical specimens from patients with mammary carcinoma, an epithelial cancer, were studied with antisera to human free secretory component by indirect immunofluorescence microscopy. Normal breast tissue (10 cases) showed fluorescent epithelial cells confined to normal ducts. This was in marked contrast to ubvasive mammary carcinoma (20 cases), which showed intense staining of tumor cells and stromal cells in addition to the normal ductular epithelium. Metastases in axillary lymph nodes (2 cases) showed intense fluorescence for secretory component, whereas axillary nodes without metastases from 2 patients with breast cancer showed no fluorescence. In both normal and tumor tissue, antiimmunoglobulin A stained only ducts and subepithelial plasma cells, thus establishing that the secretory component in tumor cells was not part of an intact secretory immunoglobulin A molecule. This finding was not restricted to mammary carcinoma, since preliminary studies of colon, lung, and bladder carcinoma also demonstrated tumor cells with cytoplasmic fluorescence for secretory component. In contrast, the tumor cells in 2 cases of sarcoma, a nonepithelial cancer, did not exhibit fluorescence for secretory component.

Measles virus panniculitis subsequent to vaccine administration.

A severe illness developed gradually in a healthy boy following administration of live measles vaccine at age 14 years. Killed measles vaccine had been given at age 2. Panniculitis began near the site of live vaccine injection, extended contiguously to involve the entire upper arm, and then began to appear in distant subcutaneous sites. He was febrile, leukopenic, anemic, and lost weight rapidly. Evidence of a cause-and-effect relationship between the lesions and the measles vaccine included biopsy findings of particles closely resembling measles nucleocapsids and complete virions by electron microscopy, positive fluorescence after staining with two anti-measles nucleocapsid sera, and immunologic aberrations. The lesions regressed after various treatments and completely remitted on two occasions, but recurred. He became severely malnourished and finally died 29 months after the measles vaccination. At autopsy, pannicultitis was found in the subcutis and mesentery, without evidence of involvement of the brain or other vital organs.