BACKGROUND Screening and treatment of latent tuberculosis infection (LTBI) prior to anti-tumour necrosis factor alpha (anti-TNF-alpha) therapy has been shown to decrease the incidence of active tuberculosis (TB) by more than 80%, and is recommended by the British Thoracic Society. In the absence of a gold standard test for LTBI, conventional screening currently involves taking a clinical histor...

NY-ESO-1, a member of the cancer-testis family of antigens, is expressed in a subset of a broad range of different human tumor types. Patients with advanced NY-ESO-1-expressing tumors frequently develop humoral immunity to NY-ESO-1, and three HLA A2-restricted peptides were defined previously as targets for cytotoxic CD8(+) T cells in a melanoma patient with NY-ESO-1 antibody. The objectives of...

The interferon-gamma (IFNgamma) ELISpot assay has become the most critical tool for HIV vaccine evaluation. External factors affecting ELISpot results must be minimized for the data to be reliably used in vaccine research and development processes. In pre-clinical pigtail macaque studies analyzing HIV/SIV vaccine studies, we detected a strong correlation between levels of granulocytes contamina...

The aim of this prospective study was to investigate the diagnostic performance of Borrelia (Bb)-induced interferon (IFN)-γ secretion detected by ELISPOT modified to be feasible for clinical laboratories as a supplementary test to the laboratory diagnosis of Lyme neuroborreliosis (LNB) in an endemic setting. Between 2002 and 2004, patients with symptoms of suspected clinical LNB were included i...

PURPOSE Define an immunologic response using the tetramer and enzyme-linked immunospot (ELISPOT) assays. EXPERIMENTAL DESIGN Ten healthy subjects and 21 patients with melanoma (all HLA-A*0201) donated a total of 121 blood samples to determine the lower limit of detection (LLD), analytic coefficient of variation (aCV), and physiologic CV (pCV) of the tetramer and ELISPOT assays. The mean, SD, ...

The Enzyme Linked ImmunoSpot (ELISPOT) is a new rapid T cell based blood test (otherwise known as an interferon-c assay) for the diagnosis of latent tuberculosis infection. The commercially available form of the assay, T-SPOTH TB (Oxford Immunotec, Abingdon, UK) has European regulatory approval as an in vitro diagnostic test and is increasingly being used in clinical practice. The test is based...

BACKGROUND Atypical spinal tuberculosis (TB) usually presents in a slowly indolent manner with nonspecific clinical presentations making the diagnosis a great challenge for physicians. New technologies for the detection of atypical spinal TB are urgently needed. The aim of this study was to assess the diagnostic value of an enzyme-linked immunospot (ELISPOT) assay in clinically suspected cases ...

Diagnosis of ongoing or past infection with Coxiella burnetii, the causative agent of Q fever, relies heavily on serology: the measurement of C. burnetii-specific antibodies, reflecting the host's humoral immune response. However, cell-mediated immune responses play an important, probably even more relevant, role in infections caused by the intracellular C. burnetii bacterium. Recent studies ha...

BACKGROUND Classical screening methods are incapable to properly detect LTBI (Latent TB Infection) and HCWs (Healthcare Workers) are at the high risk of exposure. Only few reports estimated the prevalence of LTBI among Iranian HCWs and they mostly used the TST (Tuberculin Skin Test), rather than assessing the response against TB-specific antigens. OBJECTIVES The current study aimed to determi...

To date, the sensitivity of the interferon gamma (IFN-gamma) enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay (ELISA) to detect Johne's disease (JD) has been poor, especially in the early stages of disease. To improve the sensitivity of IFN-gamma detection in the early stages of infection, an alternate assay needs to be developed. The enzyme-linked immunospot (ELISPOT) assay is a highly sensitive technique fo...