ABSTRACT
This chapter reviews the rationale for using specific active immunotherapy as an adjuvant following curative surgery for non small cell lung cancer. The case histories of six patients are examined. Healthy animals can be induced to mount a selective and destructive immunologic attack on various target organs if these animals are immunized with an homogenate of Freund's complete adjuvant plus an appropriate target organ antigen. The most straightforward explanation for the late appearance of non regional metastases and the late regional recurrence observed in these six patients is, quite simply, that each had a slowly growing tumor. This has been most ably argued by Geddes in a hypothesis published in 197953 and more recently by Scott. "Tumors with slow doubling times would require 10 years to become clinically evident, the time needed for a single cell left at operation to grow to a diagnosable tumor".
