Anti-CHIKV Env monoclonal antibody, clone IN452

Chikungunya virus (CHIKV) re-emerged as a globalized health threat fifteen years ago. There are dozens of RT-PCR assays published. An inventory of the latter was made, and after in silico analysis, two assays were selected for their ability to detect strains belonging to the five CHIKV genetic lineages. They were combined in order to provide a robust assay not affected by genetic point mutations and the resulting Duo CHIKV real-time RT-PCR assay was compared to the two parental single-plex tests against five strains belonging to the five genetic lineages. The Duo CHIKV assay performed equally, or better, in terms of sensitivity, specificity, linearity and signal intensity. Dual-target assays are better suited for viruses having the propensity to evolve into new variants via point mutations or major sequence deletions/insertions. Here, we demonstrated that combining two single systems into a dual-target assay did not impair sensitivity and specificity, and proved a potent diagnostic tool to face a potential emergence of CHIKV variants by newly evolving mutations.

We propose a latent chikungunya viral infection model with multitarget cells and saturated incidence rate. The model is an (3n+2)-dimensional system of nonlinear delay differential equations (DDEs) that describes the population dynamics of CHIKV, n categories of uninfected target cells, n categories of infected cells and antibodies. The model is incorporated by intracellular discrete or distributed time delays. The qualitative behavior of the model is studied. We investigate the global stability of the equilibria of the models by using direct Lyapunov method. The effect of the time delay on the stability of the equilibria has also been illustrated by numerical simulations.