It’s scary when our pets are sick and they can’t directly tell us what’s wrong. When our cats or dogs are experiencing distress, it’s important to rapidly rule out serious illnesses like feline panleukopenia and canine parvovirus.
Now, researchers from Sichuan University report the development of improved lateral flow assays for at-home screening. In tests on veterinary clinic samples, the assays demonstrated 100% sensitivity and reproducibility for both parvoviruses.
According to the paper published in ACS’ Analytical Chemistry, the test strips detect viral proteins similar to the way at-home COVID-19 or flu tests do. They developed a simple DNA detection process to replicate and tag a portion of the cat parvovirus’s genetic material, known as the VP2 gene. The method involves two steps carried out in a small vial warmed by a person’s hand, taking about 35 minutes. Then the solution is deposited onto a lateral flow strip. When the targeted viral DNA is present, the strip produces a red line.
The team applied the new process to 14 anal swab samples from a veterinary clinic, and it correctly distinguished all the FPV-positive and FPV-negative samples. A commercial test strip for detecting viral proteins did not identify one FPV-positive specimen. Then the team adapted the test to detect a mutation in the VP2 gene, which differentiates CPV from the feline version. Again, the process demonstrated 100% accuracy on 38 real samples from dogs, outperforming a commercial lateral flow immunoassay that missed four CPV-positive samples.
Finally, the team created a dual-test strip to check for FPV and feline herpesvirus (FHV), which often co-infect cats. In tests with spiked samples, the strip detected the viruses with 88% and 96% accuracy for FPV and FHV, respectively.
The approach is an accurate, simple way to diagnose sick pets at home.
Data from American Chemical Society