Authors
B Rooney3; T Piening2; P Buscher1; S Roge1; C M Smales3; 1 Institute Tropical Medicine, Antwerp, Belgium; 2 MSF, Netherlands; 3 University of Kent Discussion
The development of rapid serodiagnostic tests for sleeping sickness and other diseases caused by kinetoplastids relies on the affordable production of parasite-specific recombinant antigens. Here, we describe the production of recombinant antigens from Trypanosoma brucei gambiense (T.b. gambiense) in the related species Leishmania tarentolae (L. tarentolae), and compare their diagnostic sensitivity and specificity to native antigens currently used in diagnostic kits against a panel of human sera. 10 mg/L of recombinant protein (mean) was purified and subsequently tested against a panel of sera from sleeping sickness patients from controls, i.e. persons without sleeping sickness living in HAT endemic countries. The evaluation on sera from 172 T.b. gambiense human African trypanosomiasis (HAT) patients and from 119 controls showed very high diagnostic potential of the two recombinant VSG and the rISG65 fragments with areas under the curve between 0.97 and 0.98 compared to 0.98 and 0.99 with native VSG LiTat 1.3 and VSG LiTat 1.5 (statistically not different). L. tarentolae expression system enables simple, cheap and efficient production of recombinant kinetoplatid proteins for use in diagnostic, vaccine and drug discovery research that does not rely on animal use to gener 
