Evaluation of Monoclonal Antibody-Based Sandwich Direct ELISA (MSD-ELISA) for Antigen Detection of Foot-and-Mouth Disease Virus Using Clinical Samples

A monoclonal antibody-based sandwich direct ELISA (MSD-ELISA) method was previously developed for foot-and-mouth disease (FMD) viral antigen detection. Here we evaluated the sensitivity and specificity of two FMD viral antigen detection MSD-ELISAs and compared them with conventional indirect sandwich (IS)-ELISA. The MSD-ELISAs were able to detect the antigen in saliva samples of experimentally-infected pigs for a longer term compared to the IS-ELISA. We also used 178 RT-PCR-positive field samples from cattle and pigs affected by the 2010 type-O FMD outbreak in Japan, and we found that the sensitivities of both MSD-ELISAs were about 7 times higher than that of the IS-ELISA against each sample (P<0.01). In terms of the FMD-positive farm detection rate, the sensitivities of the MSD-ELISAs were about 6 times higher than that of the IS-ELISA against each farm (P<0.01). Although it is necessary to conduct further validation study using the other virus strains, MSD-ELISAs could be appropriate as a method to replace IS-ELISA for FMD antigen detection.