Isolation and quantitation of the platelet membrane glycoprotein deficient in thrombasthenia using a monoclonal hybridoma antibody.

We used the hybridoma technique to characterize further the platelet glycoprotein abnormality in Glanzmann's thrombasthenia. Spleen cells from Balb/c mice immunized with human platelets were fused to mouse myeloma cell line Sp2/0-Ag14. Hybridoma lines producing a variety of antiplatelet antibodies were isolated by hypoxanthine-aminopterin-thymidine selection and cloned, and purified monoclonal IgG from six lines was prepared. One of these lines, 8aB5-9, produced an antibody, Tab, that binds to a protein on normal but not thrombasthenic platelets. We isolated this protein from Triton X-100 solubilized normal platelet membranes by affinity chromatography on Tab-Sepharose. As determined by SDS polyacrylamide gel electrophoresis, the isolated protein is a complex of glycoproteins IIb and IIIa, because the two subunits comigrate with glycoproteins IIb and IIIa of whole platelets and show identical changes in mobility after disulfide bond reduction. We prepared (125)I-Tab to determine the number of glycoprotein IIb-IIIa complexes on normal and thrombasthenic platelets by a direct binding assay. Platelets from 17 normal donors bound 39,000+/-4,600 (SD) Tab molecules/platelet. Platelets from four patients with thrombasthenia lacked Tab binding sites (<5%). Five obligate and four presumed heterozygotes for thrombasthenia bound 24,500+/-5,800 Tab molecules/platelet. The platelet alloantigen, Pl(Al), is not that recognized by Tab, because platelets from three Pl(Al)-negative subjects bound Tab normally. Studies with the Tab antibody have (a) enabled quantitation of the number of glycoprotein IIb-IIIa complexes on normal platelet membranes, (b) demonstrated that thrombasthenic homozygotes lack and heterozygotes have a partial deficiency of this complex, and (c) made possible the isolation of this membrane protein which may be required for normal platelet aggregation and clot retraction.