Production of antigen specific procoagulant activity; effect of various culture supernatants.

Culture supernatants (CS) of peripheral blood mononuclear cells (PBM) from normal subjects and patients with autoimmune thyroid disease (AITD) have been tested for procoagulant inducing activity. CS of PBM from patients with AITD stimulated with solubilized thyroid antigen induced significantly greater procoagulant activity (PCA) in a human monocyte-like cell line, U937, than CS of PBM from normal subjects similarly tested, suggesting that PBM from patients released a procoagulant inducing factor(s) into ambient fluid in response to thyroid antigen stimulation. There was a significant correlation between PCA inducing activity in PBM and that in CS from those same PBM cultures. CS from normal T lymphocytes stimulated with large amounts of thyroid antigen (putative suppressor factor) had no suppressive effect on thyroid antigen-induced PCA production in PBM from patients with AITD. These observations suggest that the helper activity for antigen-induced PCA production appears to be mediated, at least in part, by soluble factor(s); conversely, these helper cells were not apparently subject to suppressor influences under these circumstances.