Production kinetics and immunochemical properties of carcinoembryonic antigen and nonspecific cross-reacting antigen synthesized by various human tumor cell lines.

The production kinetics and immunochemical properties of carcinoembryonic antigen (CEA) and nonspecific cross-reacting antigen (NCA) in various human tumor cell lines were studied. By radioimmunoassay (RIA), five CEA-producing tumor cell lines tested--2 derived from colonic (M7609 and CCK-81), one from pancreatic (QGP-1) and 2 from lung (HLC-1 and KNS-62) carcinomas--were found to produce NCA simultaneously. The cellular contents of CEA and NCA and the amounts of both antigens released into the culture medium were highly variable among the cell lines. It was a distinct contrast that one cell line (CCK-81) released very large amounts of CEA and NCA into the medium while having the smallest amounts of both antigens in the cells, whereas the others contained much larger amounts of the antigens in the cells as compared with the amounts released into the medium. For most of the cell lines, the production of both CEA and NCA increased in the stationary phase of growth as compared with the exponential phase. The production kinetics of both CEA and NCA appeared to be parallel with each other in all the cell lines, though the amount ratio of CEA to NCA produced was variable. By means of a double immunodiffusion test with polyclonal antibodies, antigenic uniformity with no unique organ-specificity was confirmed for all the CEA preparations from spent media of the cell lines, though some differences in the sugar moiety of CEA were detected by RIA using monoclonal antibodies. No antigenic differences among NCA preparations were observed. Upon sodium dodecyl sulfate-polyacrylamide gel electrophoresis (SDS-PAGE), molecular heterogeneity was observed among CEA or NCA preparations isolated from cell lysates.