1992 Volume 28 Issue 4 Pages 464-471
Monocytes in charge of cellular immunity have the phagocytic function. It is extremely important to measure the phagocytic activity in the field of both basic and clinical medicine. But it is complicated and difficult to separate only monocytes from peripheral blood, and so there are no decisive methods of the measurement under the present conditions.
Therefore authors developed a new method which measured the phagocytic capacity of monocytes, using the mononuclear cells (mixture of monocytes and lymphocytes) in peripheral blood and the microscopic magnetic beads. This method is based on the principle, which attracts the monocytes phagocytized magnetic beads by magnetic force in a magnetophoretic bath effecting the direct magnetic field of the permanent magnet, and which separates the phagocytizing monocytes from the non phagocytizing monocytes and lymphocytes. This method has several advantages, such as, it is a simple, easy and quantitative procedure, compared with those currently in use.
This paper explaines the method of mesurement and the experiment evaluates the actual clinical data, which demonstrates the usefulness of the method.
