Production of both macrophage activating and inhibiting activities by a murine T-lymphocyte hybridoma

Abstract

T lymphocytes are known to secrete a variety of factors which affect macrophage function¹, including those which inhibit migration (MIF) and activate macrophages (MAF) to become cytotoxic¹, and produce neutral proteases², complement components³ and other factors. Physical separation of MIF from MAF has not been achieved⁴ and efforts directed towards characterizing these factors have been limited chiefly by their generation from lymph nodes or spleen cells and the difficulty in performing most macrophage function assays. We elected to approach the problem of generation of lymphokine by fusing concanavalin A (Con A)-activated AKR spleen cells to the AKR T-cell lymphoma BW5147 and measuring the biological activity using established assays. We describe here the generation of a cloned T-cell hybridoma whose supernatants produce both inhibition of macrophage migration and activation of macrophages for the production of C2 and elastase.