The aim was to evaluate two commercial immunoblot Lyme Borreliosis IgG kits namely the Euroimmun Anti-Borrelia IgG EUROLine-RN-AT (a recombinant line blot using a scanning software program) and the Trinity Biotech EU Lyme + VlsE IgG Western Blot for the detection of IgG to a whole cell lysate of Borrelia afzelii PKO and purified proteins of B. garinii Osp C and B. burgdorferi VlsE compared to in-house IgG western immunoblots using separate whole cell lysates of B. burgdorferi and B. afzelii. Trinity Biotech and in-house western immunoblots require manual reading of specific bands.
224 stored serum samples were tested previously by EIA and in-house western immunoblots including 49 considered positive with 5 or more bands according to the CDC criteria (MMWR 1995;44(31):590-1) and 175 negative with four or less bands in either B. burgdorferi or B. afzelii or both blots. The 175 negative specimens included a specificity panel of 23 sera positive for diseases such as leptospirosis (n=4), syphilis (4), H. pylori (4), EBV (4) and positive autoimmune disease indicators ANA (4) and rheumatoid factor (3). Compared with the in-house western immunoblots, the recombinant antigen EUROLine IgG had an overall agreement of only 78% (174 / 224), sensitivity of 82% (40 / 49) and specificity of 77% (134 / 175). Within the specificity panel alone only 17/23 results were negative as expected. Preliminary testing of the Trinity Biotech IgG western blot initially showed a much higher agreement of 97% (36 / 37) including the specificity panel which gave 100% agreement (23/23). More specimens were still to be tested at the time of this abstract.
Agreement so far is as expected when comparing the two whole cell lysate immunoblots but the EUROLine recombinant line blot results were disappointing.