Strictly screening of HTLV-1/2 peptides can drive the development of rapid point-of-care tests

The Human T-cell lymphotropic virus (HTLV-1/2) cause neglected infections that drives life-threatening diseases and the numbers of infected people around the world are underestimated. Point-of-care tests (POCT) are useful to identifying carriers, to controlling the infection’s spread with timely and cost-effectiveness, to include the most affected areas and susceptible populations, and the establishment of public health policies, including the control of vertical transmission. After in silico analysis of Env, Gag and Tax proteins of HTLV-1 and HTLV-2, we synthetized and characterized peptides to screening antibodies anti-HTLV-1/2 with high sensitivity and specificity. The 173 peptides chosen were screened by immunoblot, and by indirect in-house ELISA. Peptides that had best performed in recognize both, HTLV-1 or HTLV-2 sera from infected individual, were Gag-HTLV-1 and Gag-HTLV-2 showing to be very good candidates for screening tests. Peptides of Tax-HTLV-1, and Env-HTLV-2 had discriminated sera from HTLV-1 and HTLV-2 with high sensitivity and specificity. The screening of HTLV-1/2 peptides showed here, including the use of sera from HIV-infected individuals along with seronegative ones were crucial to avoid the use of peptides with unspecific reaction in the final pilot tests, and to reach the Point-of-care test that is under registration at regulatory Brazilian agency.