The number of spontaneous lung metastases of the human colon cancer cell line HT29 transplanted into SCID mice was quantified. The lungs were sliced, randomly distributed in agar blocks and the number of lung metastases was counted for each of 39 animals. A nearly exponential increase of metastases with weight of the tumor at the implantation site was observed. This suggests that a critical tumor weight for the initiation of metastatic spread exists. Calculating the data, a simplified quantitative assessment of the metastatic load by counting ten histological sections only for the estimation of the total number of lung metastases is proposed.
