Comparative analysis of three immunoassays for SARS-CoV-2 detection

Abstract

As the 2019 coronavirus disease (COVID-19) spread rapidly around the world starting in late 2019, researchers were intrigued by the emerging severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) virus. In many nations, the real-time reverse transcription polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR) is the accepted "gold standard" technique to detect COVID-19 because of its rapid process with high-level specificity. To solve the false-positive results caused by real-time RT-PCR test, more immunoassays in serological diagnosis need to be developed such as enzyme-linked immunosorbent assays (ELISA), chemiluminescent immunoassays (CLIA) and lateral flow immunoassays (LFIA). When it comes to IgG antibodies, ELISA has excellent specificity and sensitivity, and it has higher accurately resulted in the detection of patients after 7 days symptom, but the process is lengthier. LFIA is the fastest approach but has lower sensitivity with limit detection duration of early stage, and CLIA has short procedure with high sensitivity with required high-costly equipment to test samples. Highly sensitive and specific SARS-CoV-2 infection diagnosis was made achievable by serology-based immunoassay, and ELISA is the best tool to confirmed COVID-19 in patient, and LFIA and CLIA would provide useful additional instruments for SARS-CoV-2 analysis. This research will compare and analyze the application performance of these three detection methods in detecting viruses.