An Immune Reaction in Tissue Culture. ∗

Abstract

The method of tissue culture has not been extensively used for immunological purposes. Carrel and Ingelbritsten 1 and Przygode 2 have shown that lymph node, bone marrow and spleen react in tissue culture to the presence of antigens by the formation of specific antibodies.

This report is the first on a series of experiments in which we have cultivated various tissues from normal and immunized animals and have watched the effect of the addition of antigens to the cultures.

In one set of experiments we cultured the lungs of 8 normal rabbits and those of 5 rabbits immunized against pigeon erythrocytes. After allowing the cultures to develop for several days, they were washed in Ringer's solution. Each culture then received a drop of pigeon erythrocytes suspended in bone marrow or embryonic extract. The cultures were carefully observed in the living condition and after fixation at various periods were sectioned and stained. Cultures of rabbit lung are characterized by great numbers of phagocytes; these we consider to be of mesenchymal origin. They are identical with the alveolar phagocytes of the adult lung.

Pigeon erythrocytes when added to cultures of lungs from normal rabbits attach themselves to the phagocytes of the cultures but are rarely taken up by these cells in periods as long as twelve days. The phagocytes in cultures of lungs from immunized rabbits, however, take up great numbers of the erythrocytes in a few hours. No difference was noted in the reactions of the lungs from those rabbits which had previously received one injection, and those which had received two injections of pigeon erythrocytes in the process of immunization.