AIT expert Peter Hetteger proves in his publication that not only antibody testing but even titer determination is possible from saliva. The journal PLOS ONE congratulated after the work aroused great interest and found itself among the most cited scientific papers in 2019.
As part of his dissertation, Peter Hettegger and the PepPipe team from the Competence Unit Molecular Diagnostics (Center for Health and Bioresources) proved in his published work that non-invasive antibody testing is possible from saliva. Even a titer determination can be determined, i.e. the concentration of the antibodies can be identified. The publication also shows that each person has a unique antibody signature, similar to a fingerprint, which matches in blood and saliva.
The work published in PLOS ONE has gained great interest, especially in the context of the Corona pandemic, and has been cited in 15 scientific papers within this short period of time. This puts the original scientific article in the TOP 10% of papers published by PLOS ONE in 2019. - The journal congratulated the authors.
The research was performed using high-multiplex peptide array analysis. The advantage over conventional antibody tests lies in the use of chemically synthesisable peptides, which are chemically highly standardised, very pure and reproducibly producible, and thus relatively cheap. In the future, diagnostic companies could switch from very elaborately produced proteins to simply produced peptides.
This concept and the associated technologies have been developed over the last 4 years under the coordination of Andreas Weinhäusel in the PepPipe project. The AIT experts can now offer a complete immunomics analysis pipeline by which further projects have already been acquired.
Link to paper: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0218456
Hettegger, Peter, Jasmin Huber, Katharina Paßecker, Regina Soldo, Ulrike Kegler, Christa Nöhammer, und Andreas Weinhäusel. 2019. „High Similarity of IgG Antibody Profiles in Blood and Saliva Opens Opportunities for Saliva Based Serology“. PLOS ONE 14 (6): e0218456. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0218456