Background: Measurement of antibody responses to polysaccharide antigens is regarded as an important assessment of an individual's ability to respond to carbohydrate antigens. The currently used assays for the measurement of pneumococcal-specific antibody use the multi-serotype vaccine Pneumovax as the detection antigen.
Methods: An equal potency enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay (ELISA) system was used to compare the measurement of serotype-specific antibody with the multi-serotype assay.
Results: Our results show that the concentration of specific antibody to Pneumovax is not related to the concentration of antibody to the individual serotypes. Neither is any correlation found between the antibody concentrations to any of the three single serotypes investigated, to the mixture of the three serotypes or to Pneumovax.
Conclusion: We conclude that the measurement of the concentration of the specific antibody to the mixed serotypes present in Pneumovax has serious limitations when used to evaluate the protection acquired from Pneumovax immunization against any specific serotype.