Development and evaluation of multiplexed immunoassay for detection of antibodies to HPV vaccine types.

Reliable antibody based-assays are needed to evaluate the immunogenicity of current vaccines, impact of altered dosing schemes or of new vaccine formulations. An ideal assay platform would allow multiplex type-specific detection with minimal sample requirement. We used the Meso Scale Discovery (MSD) electrochemiluminescence based detection platform to develop a multiplex direct virus-like particle (VLP) ELISA to detect antibodies to HPV 6, 11, 16, and 18 with a protocol developed for detection using the SI 6000 imager (M4ELISA). MSD prepared the plates in the 7-spot/well format, using the purified VLPs (4 spots) and PBS+BSA pH7.4 (3 blank spots). Three-point titrations and the parallel line method were used to calculate antibody levels. Dynamic range, precision, and stability of pre-printed plates were determined using a panel of previously characterized sera. Cut-off values using children's sera were established using 99% RLU limits based on the 4-parameter Johnson Su best fit curve. Results of the M4ELISA were compared to competitive Luminex Immunoassay (cLIA) on n = 4454 sera from a predominantly unvaccinated cohort. Using a VLP coating concentration of 80 µg/ml with BSA provided the most robust RLU signal for all types. The dynamic range of the assay was about 1000 fold, with assay variability under 25% for each of the four vaccine types. Long-term stability of the plates extended to about 7 months from the time plates was received in the laboratory after printing. There was moderate agreement (κ = 0.38-0.54) between M4ELISA and cLIA, with antibody detection for each of the 4 types more frequent with M4ELISA. Quantitative analysis however showed a good correlation between concordant samples by both assays (ρ ≥ 0.6). The MSD platform shows promise for simultaneous quantitation of the antibody responses to four HPV vaccine types in a high-throughput manner.

ArrayExplorer, a program in Visual Basic for robust and accurate filter cDNA array analysis.

Determining the dynamics in the global regulation of gene expression holds the promise of bringing a better understanding of the processes that govern physiological cell growth regulation and its disruption during the development of disease. The advent for cDNA arrays has created the possibility for the parallel analysis of expression of thousands of genes in a given cell population, simultaneously. The level of expression of a given set of genes within the studied tissue corresponds to the intensity of a labeled cDNA probe synthesized from the studied tissue RNA and bound specifically to the cDNAs of the genes spotted on the array. The accurate extraction of gene expression intensity values is essential for further data analysis and the interpretation of the obtained results. Here, we describe a new array image-processing software developed in Microsoft Visual Basic, the ArrayExplorer, which provides a user-friendly, multiple-window interface and a number of automatic and manual features that facilitate a reliable, robust, and accurate extraction of gene intensity values from filter-array images.