Myasthenia gravis : comparative autoantibody assays using human muscle, TE671, and glucocorticoid-treated TE671 cells as sources of antigen

Abstract The use of acetylcholine receptors (AChR) from the readily available TE671 cell line as a practical alternative to human muscle for monitoring the anti-AChR antibody assay in sera of Myasthenia gravis patients has been recently proposed. Most of the TE671 culture protocols include the use of glucocorticoids. Glucocorticoids were shown to upregulate the acetylcholine receptor expression in TE671 cells. To confirm the advantage of using AChR from TE671 cells (AChR TE ) and to validate the use of AChR from glucocorticoid-treated cells (AChR GT ) in AChR antibody measurement, the three different antigens (muscle AChR (AChR MU ), AChR TE , and AChR GT ) were compared for radioimmunoprecipitation assay. We found that, despite a slight underestimation of the antibody titers using AChR TE and AChR GT compared to AChR MU , and considering the rare cases of AChR MU antibody titer category permutations, the correlations between the values were satisfactory.