Development of a Gold Nanoparticle-Based Lateral-Flow Immunoassay for Pneumocystis Pneumonia Serological Diagnosis at Point-of-Care

Abstract

Gold-Based Immunonanodiagnosis of Pneumocystis Pneumonia of PcP serodiagnosis at point-of-care. The optimization, validation and implementation of this strip-based approach may help to reduce the high cost of medical diagnosis and subsequent treatment of PcP both in industrialized and low-income regions, helping to manage the disease all around the world.

Detection of anti-Pneumocystis jirovecii antibodies in human serum using a recombinant synthetic multi-epitope kexin-based antigen

“…As previously demonstrated [18], this new Kex1 RSA showed applicability in the detection of specific IgM anti-P. jirovecii antibodies when applied as an antigenic tool in LFIA techniques to study active PcP in human sera. However, this brief research note aims to present the (Fig.…”

“…The design and purification process of the Kex1 RSA used in this study was previously described [18].…”

“…This was a retrospective observational study that included 76 sera from HIV-infected patients with a clinical picture of pulmonary disorders. Forty-eight sera samples were from patients with active PcP (positive laboratory detection of P. jirovecii) and 28 from patients with pneumonia due to other causes (negative laboratory detection of P. jirovecii), according to patient's categorization detailed in Tomás et al 2019 [18]. The morbidities associated with pulmonary symptoms in patients without P. jirovecii infection were not known at the time of the patient's enrollment.…”

“…Reports of high human antibodies' titers to a recombinant subunit of Pneumocystis kexin-like serine protease (Kex1) correlated with a reduced incidence of PcP [13], protection against acquisition of Pneumocystis infection by vaccination with recombinant Kex1 peptides in immunosuppressed non-human primates [6], and the fact that Kex1 holds an antigenically stable active site sequence coded by a nuclear single-copy gene [16,17] confirmed the interest in this protein. Thus, a newly recombinant synthetic (multi-epitope) antigen (RSA) based on the immunogenic behavior of P. jirovecii Kex1 was designed, produced, and applied in the development of a promising lateral flow immunoassay (LFIA) for PcP diagnosis [18]. However, the diagnostic performance of a Kex1-based ELISA is missing in order to understand if this new Kex1 RSA shows any diagnostic advantage over the previous Msg RSA.…”

Gliadin-coated gold nanoparticles for rapid colorimetric test for celiac disease

“…However, the existing point-of-care methods for identifying CD are unable to provide the required diagnostic accuracy that might be affected by the higher variability in the characteristics of patients, such as their age, family history, or other clinical conditions associated with auto-immune diseases. 10 Over the last decade, nanoparticle-based technology has been applied to the early detection of multiple diseases, such as HIV, 11,12 other pathogenic infections, 13,14 pregnancy testing in women, 15 and many other applications. [16][17][18][19][20] This technology has proven to be highly sensitive, accurate, and easy to perform.…”