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Measurement of parathyroid hormone (PTH) is important for diagnosing hyper- and hypoparathyroidism. The move to two-site immunometric assays that detect the whole molecule has improved the discrimination of these conditions but these assays may be too restrictive because some PTH fragments that are biologically active may not be detected. In addition, PTH-like peptide of malignancy, an important cause of malignancy-associated hypercalcaemia, is not detected by the two-site assays.

Experiments were performed to set up a simple, robust and inexpensive bioassay for PTH, exploiting a kidney cell line and using cyclic AMP or an eluted stain assay as the end point. Of the 12 cell lines tested, an opossum kidney (WOK) cell line showed the most promise. Despite optimization of the procedure to include pre-treatment with dexamethasone, insulin and PTH, followed by incubation in the presence of 5' -guanylimidodiphosphate, isobutyl-1-methylxanthine and forskolin, the WOK cells showed insufficient sensitivity for use in a cultured cell bioassay for PTH in human serum. In addition, the cells were less sensitive to PTH-like peptide precluding their use for an assay for this molecule.

Journal of Endocrinology (1994) 143, 261–268