Recently several attempts have been made to develop glucocorticoids which show less pronounced side effects. We intended, therefore, to use experimental systems to examine the influence of newly developed nonhalogenated glucocorticoids and conventional fluorinated congeners, demonstrating similar anti-inflammatory activity in vivo, on biosynthetic capacities of human fibroblasts. Fibroblasts were kept in monolayer cultures and exposed to different concentrations of the active compounds for 6 days to analyze the influence on proliferation. Chemotaxis of fibroblasts was studied in blind well Boyden chambers. Fibroblast-conditioned medium was used as chemoattractant. All glucocorticoids tested influenced fibroblast proliferation at high (10(-5) M) and low (10(-9) M) concentration. Yet the effect was clearly more marked with fluorinated compounds. Basically, the same applied for chemotaxis. At the low concentration, however, nonfluorinated glucocorticoids exerted almost no influence. These results suggest that modifications of steroidal structure can specifically influence their effects on biosynthetic capacities of fibroblasts.