Initial characterisation of commercially available ELISA tests and the immune response of the clinically correlated SARS-CoV-2 biobank “SERO-BL-COVID-19” collected during the pandemic onset in Switzerland

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Abstract

Background

To accurately measure seroprevalance in the population, both the expected immune response as well as the assay performances have to be well characterised. Here, we describe the collection and initial characterisation of a blood and saliva biobank obtained after the initial peak of the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic in Switzerland.

Methods

Two laboratory ELISAs measuring IgA & IgG (Euroimmun), and IgM & IgG (Epitope Diagnostics) were used to characterise the biobank collected from 349 re- and convalescent patients from the canton of Basel-Landschaft.

Findings

The antibody response in terms of recognized epitopes is diverse, especially in oligosymptomatic patients, while the average strength of the antibody response of the population does correlate with the severity of the disease at each time point.

Interpretation

The diverse immune response presents a challenge when conducting epidemiological studies as the used assays only detect 90% of the oligosymptomatic cases. This problem cannot be rectified by using more sensitive assay setting as they concomitantly reduce specificity.

Funding

Funding was obtained from the “Amt für Gesundheit” of the canton Basel-Landschaft, Switzerland.

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  1. SciScore for 10.1101/2020.07.05.20145888: (What is this?)

    Please note, not all rigor criteria are appropriate for all manuscripts.

    Table 1: Rigor

    Institutional Review Board StatementIRB: Ethics statement: This study is part of the project ‘COVID-19 in Baselland Investigation and Validation of Serological Diagnostic Assays and Epidemiological Study of Sars-CoV-2 specific Antibody Responses (SERO-BL-COVID-19)’ approved by the ethics board “Ethikkommission Nordwestund Zentralschweiz (EKNZ)”, Hebelstrasse 53, 4056 Basel representative of Swissethics under the number (2020-00816).
    Consent: Every participant has received a written informed consent at least 24 hours before participating in this study (attached original document in German language).
    Randomizationnot detected.
    Blindingnot detected.
    Power Analysisnot detected.
    Sex as a biological …