Development and characterization of high-throughput serological assays to measure magnitude and functional immune response against Paratyphi A in human samples.

Typhoid and Paratyphoid fever cause a global health burden, especially for the children of Southern Asia. The impact of the disease is further exacerbated by the dramatic increase of antimicrobial resistance. While vaccines against Typhi have been developed and successfully introduced, an effective vaccine targeting Paratyphi A is still lacking.

Qualification of an enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay for quantification of anti-Vi IgG in human sera.

Effective vaccines against Typhi, targeting the Vi capsular polysaccharide, have been developed and are being introduced into routine immunization in endemic countries. Vi conjugated vaccines are also being tested in new multi-component vaccine formulations. Simple, high-throughput and cost-effective assays to quantify Vi-specific IgG in clinical sera are needed.

Characterization of Enzyme-Linked Immunosorbent Assay (ELISA) for Quantification of Antibodies against Typhimurium and Enteritidis O-Antigens in Human Sera.

Nontyphoidal Salmonella (NTS) is a leading cause of morbidity and mortality caused by enteric pathogens worldwide in both children and adults, and vaccines are not yet available. The measurement of antigen-specific antibodies in the sera of vaccinated or convalescent individuals is crucial to understand the incidence of disease and the immunogenicity of vaccine candidates. A solid and standardized assay used to determine the level of specific anti-antigens IgG is therefore of paramount importance.

Integrated isolation and quantitative analysis of exosome shuttled proteins and nucleic acids using immunocapture approaches.

Clinical implementation of exosome based diagnostic and therapeutic applications is still limited by the lack of standardized technologies that integrate efficient isolation of exosomes with comprehensive detection of relevant biomarkers. Conventional methods for exosome isolation based on their physical properties such as size and density (filtration, ultracentrifugation or density gradient), or relying on their differential solubility (chemical precipitation) are established primarily for processing of cell supernatants and later adjusted to complex biological samples such as plasma. Though still representing gold standard in the field, these methods are clearly suboptimal for processing of routine clinical samples and have intrinsic limits that impair their use in biomarker discovery and development of novel diagnostics.