Development of rapid, inexpensive, sensitive, point of care (POC) antibody based diagnostic kit for canine Leptospira serovars

Leptospira, a zoonotic disease induces clinical as well as subclinical infections in animals, many times preceding in mortality. In the current study, using the nine canine serovars viz., Astratis, Ictohaemorrhagie, Canicola, Javanica, Grippotyphosa, Pomona, Pyrogenes, Potac and Banainang RDT (Rapid Diagnostic Test) kit developed to diagnose the leptospirosis disease. 190 MAT positive and negative samples were analyzed with RDT, ELISA (Enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay) kits when compared with MAT data applied as standard. 180 field samples were examined with ELISA kit and positive and negative samples were tested with RDT kit and ELISA has taken as standard. Based on the actual study the results disclosed that out of 190 samples, Positive (p) 114, Negative (n) 76 which were examined for leptospira sLPS based antigens with the gold standard method i.e. MAT were examined with RDT kit and ELISA kit. RDT showed a specificity and sensitivity of 94.73% and 93.85%, respectively, whereas ELISA showed a specificity and sensitivity of 98.63 % and 99.12 % respectively. 180 field ELISA Positive and Negative samples tested with RDT showed a specificity and sensitivity of 97.22% and 95.37% respectively. The sensitivity and specificity of developed lateral flow diagnostics for Canine Leptospira species were relatively similar to the existing gold standard method Microscopic Agglutination Test (MAT) and ELISA test kit accessible in the market.