An approach to the serodiagnosis of human lung cancer. Cell culture lines reactive as antigens with tumor patients' sera.

A solid-phase radioimmunoassay technique was used to quantitate antigen-antibody reactions between various human cell lines and lung cancer patients' sera. Four human fetal lung cell lines and four human tumor cell lines were more or less reactive as antigens. Failure to obtain exact correspondence between reactions with these cell lines indicates that more than one antigen may be required for detecting specific antibodies to the various lung tumor types. These results suggest that serum antibody detection might be a feasible approach to the immunodiagnosis of lung cancer at stages when the tumor masses are relatively small.