Novel diagnostically utilizable polypeptide, oncostatin M

摘要

The invention relates to a novel, diagnostically utilizable polypeptide which is essentially free of cell debris and other leukocyte proteins and which has the ability to prevent the in-vitro proliferation of tumour cells and stimulate the proliferation of normal human fibroblasts and which does not inhibit human proliferative or cytotoxic T cell responses or the formation of granulocytic/myelocytic bone marrow colony cells, whose molecular weight has been determined by gel exclusion chromatography to be approximately in the range 17-19 kD and determined to be approx. 28 kD by SDS-PAGE, which is relatively insensitive to moderately acid or basic conditions and to relatively elevated temperatures, whose degree of purity is such that the specific activity is at least approx. 10 GIA units/ng of protein and which contains amino acid sequences which correspond to the sequences in Figure 1 in such a way that the given sequence and the sequence which corresponds to the polypeptide differ from each other with regard to at most three amino acids, or a poly(amino acid) fragment which is formed by at least eight amino acids and which cross- reacts immunologically with such a polypeptide. The invention also relates to antibodies which have been formed against this polypeptide and to a diagnostic process for detecting this polypeptide and to a kit which can be used in this process. <IMAGE>