Clinical value of anti-Leishmania (Leishmania) chagasi IgG titers detected by flow cytometry to distinguish infected from vaccinated dogs

Leishmune® vaccination covers a broader number of endemic areas of canine visceral leishmaniasis (CVL) and therefore the development of new serological devices able to discriminate CVL from Leishmune® vaccinees becomes an urgent need considering the post-vaccine seroconversion detected throughout conventional methodologies. Herein, we have described the establishment of a flow cytometry based methodology to detect anti-fixed L. (L.) chagasi promastigotes antibodies (FC-AFPA-IgG, FC-AFPA-IgG1 and FC-AFPA-IgG2) in sera samples from Leishmania (Leishmania) chagasi infected dogs and Leishmune® vaccinees. The results of FC-AFPA were reported along the sera titration curve (1:128–1:524,288), as percentage-of-positive-fluorescent-parasite (PPFP). The use of PPFP = 20% as a cut-off edge to segregate negative and positive results at sera dilution 1:2048 revealed outstanding performance indexes that elect FC-AFPA-IgG and IgG2 (both detected by polyclonal FITC-labeled second step reagent) applicable to the serological diagnosis of CVL, with 100% of specificity for both IgG and IgG2 and 97 and 93% of sensitivity, respectively. Moreover, FC-AFPA-IgG, applied at sera dilution 1:2048, also appeared as a useful tool to discriminate L. chagasi infected dogs from Leishmune® vaccinees, with 76% of specificity. Outstanding likelihood indexes further support the performance of FC-AFPA-IgG for exclusion diagnosis of CVL in Leishmune® vaccinees. Analysis of FC-AFPA-IgG at sera dilution 1:8192 revealed the most outstanding indexes, demonstrating that besides the ability of PPFP ≤20% to exclude the diagnosis of CVL, a PPFP values higher 80%, mostly observed for infected dogs (INF) have a minimal change to come from a non-infected animal (NI) or Leishmune® vaccinees (VAC). Together, our findings showed the potential of both anti-L. chagasi FC-AFPA-IgG and IgG2 to distinguish the serological reactivity of L. chagasi infected dogs from Leishmune® vaccinees, which will further contribute for the differential diagnosis in the context of CVL immunoprophylaxis.