Adsorption of antiphospholipid antibodies on affinity magnetoliposomes

Phosphatidylcholine-based magnetoliposomes containing specific ligands for biological molecules, so-called affinity magnetoliposomes (AML), may prove to be useful as adsorbents in applications such as diagnosis or anchoring and delivery of drugs at specific sites in the human body. In the present study, the performance of affinity magnetoliposomes to adsorb anticardiolipin antibodies (aCL) from a previously characterized pool of patients with autoimmune diseases is described. The magnetic vesicles were prepared by enrobing nanometer-sized colloidal magnetite particles with a phospholipid bilayer composed of dimyristoylphosphatidylcholine (DMPC) and the affinity lipid ligand cardiolipin (CL). Adsorption of antibodies onto the affinity magnetoliposomes assayed using a high-gradient magnetophoresis (HGM) system, in which the magnetoliposomes were first magnetically captured on stainless steel fibers, and which were subsequently overflowed either with a pool of sera from autoimmune patients or sera of healthy individuals as a control. The spectrophotometric assay showed stronger changes in absorbance spectra when the affinity magnetoliposomes containing cardiolipin were added to sera of autoimmune patients than when they were added to sera of healthy individuals. The breakthrough curves obtained from a frontal analyses of the adsorption in the magnetophoresis system showed a 10% difference for total adsorbed IgG when sera of autoimmune and healthy individuals were assayed on magnetoliposomes containing cardiolipin.