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The intervention for T1D has entered the pre-T1D era, with ongoing national and international large-scale screening programs for T1D and booming clinical trials being applied in stage 1 T1D to abrogate or slow the progression to clinical T1D12,13. Measurements of four IAbs using the current standard RBA with a single IAb assay format is laborious and inefficient for a mass screening program. With the urgent demand for a high-throughput multiplexed IAbs assay, multiplexed ECL assay, 3-Screen ICA ELISA, and antibody detection by agglutination-PCR (ADAP) have emerged as currently competitive technologies. In the Fr1da study of screening for T1D in a population of young children in Germany, 3-Screen ICA ELISA combining 3 IAbs (GADA, IA-2A, and ZnT8A) was used as the main test14. A major limitation of 3-Screen ICA ELISA is the lack of IAA, which is mostly the first IAb to appear with a high prevalence in young children with T1D. Furthermore, the assay is not able to distinguish which of the three IAbs is positive from a positive signal, and every positive sample needs to be repeated with three single assays for confirmation. ADAP15 combines GADA, IA-2A, and IAA and illustrated high assay sensitivity and specificity in the IASP workshop but lacks data regarding how predictive it is in population-based screening for T1D studies, which the IASP workshop is not able to determine. The multiplex ECL assay in the present study is built on the platform of a single ECL assay that has been validated against current standard RBA in multiple clinical trials like TrailNet9,16, DAISY17,18,19, and the ASK4,20,21 study. The present assay has been validated against both RBA and single ECL assay using 880 serum samples from participants of the ASK study. As shown in Figure 2 and Figure 3, antibody levels between 6-Plex and single ECL or between 6-Plex and RBA were mostly congruent with each other for the positivity of antibodies. The coincidence rates of IAbs tested by RBA and 6-Plex were 91.7%-97.8%, and the coincidence rates of IAbs tested by single ECL and 6-Plex were 95.3%-99.2%. Discordance between the ECL assay and RBA was mainly from those with single IAb. The levels of IAbs tested by 6-Plex and single ECL (r = 0.6431-0.9434, all p < 0.0001) and 6-Plex and RBA (r = 0.5775-0.8576, all p < 0.0001) were well correlated as well. TGA tested by 6-Plex assay were highly correlated with the results of both the RBA (99.4%) and single ECL assay (99.4%). Additionally, COVID-19A tested by 6-Plex reached 99.8% compliance with the results of the single ECL assay.
As a result, the 6-Plex ECL assay has formally been accepted as the primary screening method for the ongoing ASK study and replaced the standard RBA22. This assay demonstrated its excellent sensitivity and specificity with higher throughput, lower cost, and smaller volume of serum compared with standard RBA.
It has been documented that, in the T1D screening study, single IAb detected by RBA, which took up a large proportion of IAb positivities, were of low affinity, with low disease risk, and resulted in overall low predictive value19,21,23,24,25,26. Such low risk prediction caused huge extra costs of follow-up visits and resulted in difficulties for T1D preventive studies. The established ECL assay platform has been demonstrated in multiple clinical trials to discriminate high-affinity IAbs from low-affinity IAbs generated by RBA and significantly enhance the predictive values for all four IAbs, especially with single IAb positivity16,17,18,21. The multiplex ECL assay technology was built on the platform of the single ECL assay, with this distinct advantage of the detection of high-affinity Abs. In the present study, the 6-Plex ECL assay illustrated its similarity with the corresponding single ECL assays in sensitivity and specificity.
Some limitations and the technical concerns of the multiplex ECL assay using multiple Plex plates have already been covered in previous publications27,28. With six labeled antigens in one well, there may be some influences between different antigens, and the assay background could increase when adding each antibody assay for multiplexing in the same well. A large amount of assay optimization work is needed to adjust the assay conditions, especially for adjusting the final concentrations of each labeled antigen protein based on the checkerboard assay for each antigen, to maintain the sensitivity and specificity for each antibody assay. As mentioned in previous studies27,28, a small number of samples (<1%) result in false positivity on the multiple Plex plate without a clear underlying reason. All positive results should be repeated and confirmed by a single ECL assay as routine laboratory quality assurance; usually, the false positives will be removed. False-negative results caused by the "prozone effect" observed in the previous 7-Plex ECL assay27,28 were not observed in the present study. In the assay described here, we removed the step of the acid treatment of serum samples from the previous protocol; instead, we preheated the serum samples at 56 °C for 30 min (step 5.1.). On the second day of plate washing, we used a washing buffer containing 0.4 M NaCl (step 8.1.) instead of regular washing buffer to wash the plate more stringently. These modifications made the multiplex ECL assay simpler and lowerered background without losing the assay sensitivity.
In conclusion, this assay has outstanding performance for detecting four IAbs, TGA, and COVID-19A simultaneously. The multiplexing feature, as well as the high throughput, low cost, and small serum volume requirement, make large-scale screening for T1D and concomitant diseases much more feasible in the general population. Patients with T1D or any autoimmune diseases have a much higher risk for other autoimmune diseases. The multiplex ECL assay provides an excellent platform to screen for T1D and multiple autoimmune diseases simultaneously.