Tissue-specific influences on the radiosensitivity of cells

The radiobiological investigations presented here were carried out on spherical-growing cell clones, the so-called spheroids, in order to simulate the natural organisation in vitro also. The structure and certain properties of such spheroids have already been reported in the KfK-News elsewhere. The aim of this paper is to show that spheroids of mammalian cells can exhibit fundamentally different behaviour with regard to radiation resistance from that of monolayers of the respective cell line, and that radiobiological studies on spheroids have led to the revealment of a particular type of cellular radiation resistance. (orig./AJ)