Thrombocytopenia and thrombosis following treatment with the integrin αIIbβ3 antagonist eptifibatide are rare complications caused by patient antibodies specific for ligand-occupied αIIbβ3. Whether such antibodies induce platelet clearance by simple opsonization, by inducing mild platelet activation, or both is poorly understood. To gain insight into the mechanism by which eptifibatide-dependent antibodies initiate platelet clearance, we incubated normal human platelets with patient serum containing an αIIbβ3-specific, eptifibatide-dependent antibody. We observed that in the presence of eptifibatide, patient IgG induced platelet secretion and aggregation as well as tyrosine phosphorylation of the integrin β3 cytoplasmic domain, the platelet FcγRIIa Fc receptor, the protein-tyrosine kinase Syk, and phospholipase Cγ2. Each activation event was inhibited by preincubation of the platelets with Fab fragments of the FcγRIIa-specific mAb IV.3 or with the Src family kinase inhibitor PP2. Patient serum plus eptifibatide did not, however, activate platelets from a patient with a variant form of Glanzmann thrombasthenia that expressed normal levels of FcγRIIa and the αIIbβ3 complex but lacked most of the β3 cytoplasmic domain. Taken together, these data suggest a novel mechanism whereby eptifibatide-dependent antibodies engage the integrin β3 subunit such that FcγRIIa and its downstream signaling components become activated, resulting in thrombocytopenia and a predisposition to thrombosis.

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Drug-induced immune thrombocytopenia (DITP) is a serious and sometimes life-threatening complication of treatment with many drugs. In most instances (excluding heparin-induced TP), platelet (plt) destruction is caused by antibodies (abs) that recognize distinct epitopes on platelet membrane glycoproteins (GP) only when the sensitizing drug is present in soluble form. How drug at pharmacological levels promotes tight binding of antibody to a specific target is unknown, in part because only polyclonal human abs have been available for study. We sought to produce monoclonal abs (mAbs) that mimic the behavior of human drug-dependent abs to create tools that can be used to study the molecular basis for this interaction. Mice were immunized with GPIIb/IIIa isolated from human platelets together with soluble quinine (Qn), tirofiban (Tf), or eptifibatide (Ef), three drugs that commonly cause DITP. Hybridomas were prepared from splenic B cells using a standard protocol and approximately 550 supernatants from each cultured hybrid line were screened for DDAbs by flow cytometry using normal platelets as targets. To date, 11 Abs that react with GPIIb/IIIa only in the presence of the immunizing drug (2 Qn-, 3 Tf- and 6 Ef-specific) have been identified. Preliminary studies show that the Qn-specific abs bind reversibly to GPIIb/IIIa at 50 nM Qn, a concentration much lower than is achieved pharmacologically, and are not inhibited by Qn at 5 mM, the limit of solubility. Quinidine (Qd) the diastereoisomer of Qn, supports only weak ab binding at a concentration of 50 uM. The tirofiban and eptifibatide-dependent abs recognize GPIIb/IIIa occupied by these RGD ligand-mimetic GPIIb/IIIa inhibitors. In each of these respects, reaction patterns of the three groups of mAbs closely resemble those of abs from patients experiencing TP after treatment with one of these drugs. These findings show that mAbs mimicking the behavior of human drug-dependent abs can be produced by immunizing mice with GP and soluble drug to produce probes suitable for characterizing the molecular basis of ab-drug-target interactions leading to platelet destruction in DITP. It is noteworthy that these mAbs were induced using soluble drug and protein for immunization because this suggests that the immune response leading to DITP does not require the sensitizing drug to be covalently linked to a protein, i.e, does not require the drug to act as a classical hapten.