Development and assessment of an improved recombinant multiepitope antigen-based immunoassay to diagnose chronic Chagas Disease

PEVERENGO, MARIA LUZ; GARCIA, VALERIA; RODELES, MARIA LUZ; MENDICINO, DIEGO; VICCO, MIGUEL; GONZALEZ, VERONICA; MARCIPAR, IVAN

PARASITOLOGY

CAMBRIDGE UNIV PRESS

Lugar: Cambridge; Año: 2018

0031-1820

The use of chimeric molecules fusing several antigenic determinants is a promising strategyfor the development of low-cost, standardized and reliable kits to determine specificantibodies. In this study, we designed and assessed a novel recombinant chimera thatcomplements the performance of our previously developed chimera, CP1 (FRA and SAPAantigens), to diagnose Chronic Chagas disease (CCD). The new chimeric protein, namedCP3, is composed of MAP, TcD and TSSAII/V/VI antigenic determinants. We comparedthe performance of both chimeric antigens using a panel of 67 T. cruzi-reactive sera and 67non-reactive ones. The sensitivity of CP3 vs CP1 was 100% and 90.2%, and specificitywas 92.5% and 100%, respectively. The mixture of CP1+CP3 achieved 100% of sensitivityand specificity. More importantly, an additional subset of 17 sera from patients withdiscordant results of conventional serological methods was analyzed; the CP1+CP3 mixtureallowed us to accurately classify 14 of them with respect to IIF, the usual technique used inmost of the reference centers. These results show an improved performance of theCP1+CP3 mixture in comparison with ELISA and IAH commercial assays.