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Angiogenesis is an essential process in the progression of malignant tumors and the most potent angiogenic factor is the vascular endothelial growth factor (VEGF). On the other hand, the CD34 is an endothelial antigen that has been used to highlight the microvasculature vessel density (MVD) as a direct marker of the degree of neoangiogenesis. In the present study we report the VEGF expression and its relationship with MVD, measured by CD34, in two lineages of non-small cell lung cancer (NSCL): low differentiated adenocarcinomas and epidermoid carcinomas, in order to consider the possibility of using the correlation between both antibodies as a prognostic factor. Tumor sections were stained by immunohistochemistry for CD34 and VEGF. The results showed that the mean value of VEGF for adenocarcinoma was significantly higher than the one for epidermoid carcinoma (p < 0.001). However, the mean of MVD did not show significant differences between both types of tumors. The conventional factors taken into consideration (age over 60, sex, and presence of lymph nodes) was not significantly related to the angiogenic factors examined. In conclusion, we could affirm that CD34 is a better prognostic marker of neoangiogenesis in NSCLC, because both types of tumors have the same clinical prognosis, and so we expected the same behaviour from both markers.

In the present experiments we studied the effect of extracts from intact liver (LE), ES2 tumor extract (TE), plasmas from intact mice (PI), and from tumor bearing animals (PT) on different phases of hepatocytes and renocytes cell cycles. C3HS 28-day-old male mice, standardized for periodicity analysis, were injected at 16:00 hours and killed every 4 hours during a circadian cycle at 20:00/04; 00:00/08; 04:00/12; 08:00/16; 12:00/20 and 16:00/24 (time of day/hours post treatment). Colchicine (2 microg/g) was injected 4 hours before killing them. Samples of livers and kidneys were processed for histology and mitotic index determinations. The results were expressed as colchicine arrested metaphases per 1000 nuclei. The TE, LE and PI had a promoting effect on the mitotic activity of hepatocytes during the first 12 hours post treatment. During the subsequent 12 hours, not only these treatments but also the PI had an inhibiting effect on the mitotic activity of the same cell population. Also the TE and the PT had a promoting effect on the mitotic activity of the renocytes during the first 12 hours while the effect of all treatments showed a clear inhibition of the mitotic activity studied during the last 12 hours. Taking into account the time elapsed between the injections and the measurements made in these light-dark synchronized animals, we conclude that the increase in mitotic index observed in those tissues stemmed from a reinitiation of cell-cycle traverse in a subpopulation of G2-arrested, noncycling cells.