Development and evaluation of flavi-immunoglobulin M capture enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay

In this study, we report the evaluation of In-house flavi virus immunoglobulin M (IgM) capture enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay (ELISA), which can be used as a screening test to determine the infecting flavivirus serotype over the current serological methods. A panel of 88 sera (inclusive of well characterized dengue, Japanese Encephalitis (JE) and West Nile virus (WNV) positive and negative samples tested and confirmed by commercial kit) was used for evaluation of the kit. The sensitivity and specificity of the In-house capture assay versus the commercial kit for the sero-diagnosis of dengue was 100% and 87% respectively, for JE IgM, it was found to be 90% and 100% respectively, and for West Nile it was 87.5% and 90.9%. Based on the study, we concluded that this flavivirus-serotyping ELISA provides rapid results and may be used as an accurate alternate to other serological tests for the specific diagnosis of flavivirus infections.