Development and Implementation of Dried Blood Spot-Based COVID-19 Serological Assays for Epidemiologic Studies
Wong et al.
The finding, in our words
Dried blood spots collected by fingerprick at home produced SARS-CoV-2 antibody results comparable to plasma or serum in ELISA and commercial assays, reliably detecting responses months after infection and tracking post-vaccination kinetics in a community survey across 12 cities. This demonstrates that self-collected DBS enable longitudinal serosurveillance without phlebotomy, supporting their use in decentralised diagnostics when venous sampling is impractical.
A paraphrase to the Library’s standard, never the abstract. The source is one link away and is always the authority.
The study validated a semi-quantitative protocol for Epstein-Barr virus serology using dried blood spots, demonstrating 98.8% sensitivity and 96.5% specificity compared to paired venous serum samples. The successful validation in a self-sampling cohort confirms the suitability of this patient-centric microsampling approach for large-scale seroprevalence studies and decentralised trials.
Self-collected dried blood spots analysed on the Roche Elecsys platform gave quantitative anti-spike antibody results that agreed closely with paired venous samples, with sensitivity 96.63% and specificity 97.81% and a conversion formula across 0.018 to 250 U/mL, enabling accurate tracking of titre changes in longitudinal cohorts after vaccination.
Castelletti et al., Microbiology spectrum · source ↗
Dried blood spot eluates showed high agreement with serum for SARS-CoV-2 IgG against Spike and Nucleocapsid (r≈0.96; qualitative φ≈0.98–1.0) and remained stable after 6–8 hours of storage, supporting use of capillary DBS for serosurveys and decentralised testing.
Guttmann et al., Biochemistry and biophysics reports · source ↗
In 1070 young adults, dried blood spot eluates correlated strongly with serum for anti-spike IgGAM and total IgG, IgA and IgM; labDBS achieved 82.0% sensitivity and 98.2% specificity and ssDBS 86.1% sensitivity and 96.7% specificity versus serum, with minimal difference between self and investigator collection.
Ferentinos et al., Journal of immunological methods · source ↗
Dried blood spot sampling achieved high sensitivity and specificity for SARS-CoV-2 antibody detection with strong correlation to paired serum, enabling virtually painless, decentralised specimen collection in community and remote settings where venepuncture is difficult.
Catlett et al., Journal of clinical virology plus · source ↗