Development of Rapid Enzyme-Linked Immunosorbent Assays for Detection of Antibodies to Burkholderia pseudomallei

Burkholderia pseudomallei, the causative agent of melioidosis, is an environmental bacillus found in northeast Thailand. The mortality rate of melioidosis is similar to 40%. An indirect hemagglutination assay (IHA) is used as a reference serodiagnostic test; however, it has low specificity in areas where the background seropositivity of healthy people is high. To improve assay specificity and reduce the time for diagnosis, four rapid enzyme-linked immunosorbent assays (ELISAs) were developed using two purified polysaccharide antigens (O-polysaccharide [OPS] and 6-deoxyheptan capsular polysaccharide [CPS]) and two crude antigens (whole-cell [WC] antigen and culture filtrate [CF] antigen) of B. pseudomallei. The ELISAs were evaluated using serum samples from 141 culture-confirmed melioidosis patients from Thailand along with 188 healthy donors from Thailand and 90 healthy donors from the United States as controls. The areas under receiver operator characteristic curves (AUROCC) using Thai controls were high for the OPS-ELISA (0.91), CF-ELISA (0.91), and WC-ELISA (0.90), while those of CPS-ELISA (0.84) and IHA (0.72) were lower. AUROCC values using U.S. controls were comparable to those of the Thai controls for all ELISAs except IHA (0.93). Using a cutoff optical density (OD) of 0.87, the OPS-ELISA had a sensitivity of 71.6% and a specificity of 95.7% for Thai controls; for U.S. controls, specificity was 96.7%. An additional 120 serum samples from tuberculosis, scrub typhus, or leptospirosis patients were evaluated in all ELISAs and resulted in comparable or higher specificities than using Thai healthy donors. Our findings suggest that antigen-specific ELISAs, particularly the OPS-ELISA, may be useful for serodiagnosis of melioidosis in areas where it is endemic and nonendemic.