High-throughput serology analysis is important for evaluating the serostatus and potential immunity of the population. The information provided can both monitor the spread of a disease and aid in making informed decisions regarding efficient societal restrictions and vaccination strategies. A critical concern for performing high-throughput serology, especially during a pandemic, is continuous access to the required reagents.

During spring 2020, a highly performing, high-throughput and multiplex SARS-CoV-2 serology assay was in short time developed by a multidisciplinary team from KTH and SciLifeLab, also involving multiple actors within public, commercial, and healthcare sectors. The fast development of this new platform was enabled through combining already established protein production expertise and workflows at KTH, IT expertise at SciLifeLab, and the existing infrastructure of the Autoimmunity and Serology Profiling Facility. Since the beginning of the pandemic, the assay was used to analyse more than 250,000 plasma and serum samples within several research efforts. The current workflow covers the analysis pipeline from plasma or serum sample processing to data analysis and generation of multiplex serological profiles against SARS-CoV-2. All viral proteins are produced in house, which enables a flexible adaptation of the pipeline to new versions of the virus as well as entirely new infectious agents.

Research findings:

We are developing a unique resource for pandemic laboratory preparedness. The main aim is to provide an infrastructure to enable broad, frequent and large-scale seroprevalence studies with capacity for thousands of samples analysed on hundreds of antigens representing a long range of diseases with potential for future associations to pandemics.

We have generated a broad range of antigens representing pathogens causing respiratory diseases. These include a long list of corona variants, the main influenza and RSV strains and other viruses as well as tuberculosis, that could become an important component in future seroprevalence surveillance. The multi- disease serology platform has been further extended with a focus on mosquito-borne infectious diseases, such as dengue, zika and many other globally widespread viruses that are causing severe outbreaks of pandemic potential.

Impact on prepardness for future pandemics:

The possibility to perform large and broad seroprevalence studies were shown during the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic to be very important to understand the spread and effects of both infections and vaccinations. In a pandemic laboratory preparedness perspective, it is crucial that the analysis of immune responses can be followed and that it can be broad and flexible and thereby cover hundreds of different infections with pandemic potential and with capacity to analyze thousands of samples.

PI(s)/Head(s) responsible for resource

Peter Nilsson

Host organisation

KTH Royal Institute of Technology

Contact information

Autoimmunity Profiling
autoimmunity.profiling@scilifelab.se