Design of novel conformational and genotype-specific antigens for improving sensitivity of immunoassays for hepatitis C virus-specific antibodies.

The current commercially licensed enzyme-linked immunosorbent assays (ELISAs) for hepatitis C virus (HCV) mainly use recombinant proteins containing linear epitopes. There is evidence, however, that conformational epitopes of HCV are more immunoreactive. Thus, we have designed an HCV antibody assay that employs a conformational protein, NS3NS4a PI (with functional protease and helicase activities), and a linear fusion protein, multiple-epitope fusion antigen 7.