Strictly screening of HTLV-1/2 peptides can drive the development of rapid point-of-care tests
- PMID: 40306581
- DOI: 10.1016/j.jviromet.2025.115170
Strictly screening of HTLV-1/2 peptides can drive the development of rapid point-of-care tests
Abstract
The Human T-cell lymphotropic virus (HTLV-1/2) cause neglected infections that drives life-threatening diseases and the numbers of infected people around the world are underestimated. Point-of-care tests (POCT) are useful to identifying carriers, to controlling the infection's spread with timely and cost-effectiveness, to include the most affected areas and susceptible populations, and the establishment of public health policies, including the control of vertical transmission. After in silico analysis of Env, Gag and Tax proteins of HTLV-1 and HTLV-2, we synthetized and characterized peptides to screening antibodies anti-HTLV-1/2 with high sensitivity and specificity. The 173 peptides chosen were screened by immunoblot, and by indirect in-house ELISA. Peptides that had best performed in recognize both, HTLV-1 or HTLV-2 sera from infected individual, were Gag-HTLV-1 and Gag-HTLV-2 showing to be very good candidates for screening tests. Peptides of Tax-HTLV-1, and Env-HTLV-2 had discriminated sera from HTLV-1 and HTLV-2 with high sensitivity and specificity. The screening of HTLV-1/2 peptides showed here, including the use of sera from HIV-infected individuals along with seronegative ones were crucial to avoid the use of peptides with unspecific reaction in the final pilot tests, and to reach the Point-of-care test that is under registration at regulatory Brazilian agency.
Keywords: ELISA; HTLV-1; HTLV-2; Peptides; Point-of-care test.
Copyright © 2025 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
Conflict of interest statement
Declaration of Competing Interest The authors declare the following financial interests/personal relationships which may be considered as potential competing interests: Dr Agostinho G Viana works for Safetest Diagnostics. I declare, as the corresponding author, that Safetest Diagnostics had no role in the study design, in the results obtained or in the analysis of results. All the other authors declare no competing interests.