A Novel Assay for Quantifying Gn-LRP1-Mediated Neutralizing Antibodies Against Severe Fever with Thrombocytopenia Syndrome Virus

  • Emerg Microbes Infect. 2026 Apr 24:2665001. doi: 10.1080/22221751.2026.2665001.
Li-Fen Hu  1  2  3  4 ,  Meng-Ya Tu  1 ,  Ding-Ye Zhang  1 ,  Meng-Rui Sun  1 ,  Si-Yang Liu  1 ,  Yu-Yao Li  1 ,  Meng-Yu Liu  1 ,  Yidan Wang  5  4 ,  Beng-Lee Lim  6 ,  Jia-Bin Li  1  2  3 ,  Chee Wah Tan  6  4 ,  Lin-Fa Wang  4
Affiliations
  • 1. Department of Infectious Diseases, the First Affiliated Hospital of Anhui Medical University, Hefei, Anhui, China.
  • 2. Anhui Province Key Laboratory of Infectious Diseases, Anhui Medical University, Hefei, China.
  • 3. Department of Infectious Diseases, Public Health Clinical Center of Anhui Province, Hefei 230000, China.
  • 4. Programme in Emerging Infectious Diseases, Duke-National University of Singapore Medical School, Singapore, Singapore.
  • 5. Shanghai Frontiers Science Center of Genome Editing and Cell Therapy, Synthetic Biology and Biomedical Engineering Laboratory, Biomedical Synthetic Biology Research Center, Shanghai Key Laboratory of Regulatory Biology, Institute of Biomedical Sciences and School of Life Sciences, East China Normal University, Dongchuan Road 500, Shanghai 200241, China.
  • 6. Infectious Diseases Translational Research Programme, Department of Microbiology and Immunology, Yong Loo Lin School of Medicine, National University of Singapore, Singapore.
PMID: 42029113 DOI: 10.1080/22221751.2026.2665001
Abstract

Accurate and efficient determination of neutralizing antibody (nAb) is critical for assessing individual immune status of severe fever with thrombocytopenia syndrome (SFTS) and identifying key ecological reservoirs of the SFTS virus (SFTSV). However, conventional virus neutralization tests (cVNT) require live virus and are limited by their inability to support rapid, high-throughput screening. Here, we report a novel SFTSV virus neutralization test targeting the interaction between the SFTSV Gn protein and its receptor (LRP1). The test, which has been validated with SFTS patient plasma, achieves a sensitivity of 96.79% and a specificity of 100%. It also shows good correlation with cVNT, with an R² value of 0.8902 in head-to-head comparison. This platform offers a safe, rapid, and high-throughput alternative for large-scale population screening and the real-time monitoring of immune responses in SFTS patients.

Keywords
Conventional virus neutralization test; Neutralizing antibody; Severe fever with thrombocytopenia syndrome; Virus neutralization test.
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