Nontoxic virus nanofibers improve the detection sensitivity for the anti-p53 antibody, a biomarker in cancer patients

The presence of anti-p53 antibody in serum is a biomarker for cancer. However, its high sensitivity detection is still an issue in cancer diagnosis. To tackle this challenge, we used fd phage, a human-safe bacteria-specific virus nanofiber that can be mass-produced by infecting host bacteria in an error-free manner, and genetically engineered it to display a peptide capable of recognizing and capturing anti-p53 antibody on its side wall. We employed the resultant phage nanofibers as a capture probe to develop a modified version of the enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay (ELISA) method, termed phage-ELISA. We compared it to the traditional ELISA method for the detection of anti-p53 antibody, p53-ELISA, which uses recombinant wild-type p53 protein to capture anti-p53 antibody. We applied phage-ELISA to detect anti-p53 antibody in an experimental group of 316 patients with various types of malignant tumors. We found that a detection rate of 17.7% (56 positive cases) was achieved by phage-ELISA, which was comparable to the detection rate of 20.6% for p53-ELISA (65 positive cases). However, when both phage and p53 were combined to form antibody-capturing probes for phage/p53-ELISA, a detection rate of 30.4% (96 positive cases) was achieved. Our work showed that owing to the combined capture of the anti-p53 antibody by both phage nanofibers and p53, the phage/p53-ELISA achieved the highest diagnostic accuracy and detection efficiency for the anti-p53 antibody in patients with various types of cancers. Our work suggests that a combination of nanofibers and antigens, both of which capture antibody, could lead to increased detection sensitivity, which is useful for applications in the life sciences, clinical medicine, and environmental sciences.