Lancefield Whole Blood Killing Assay to Evaluate Vaccine Efficacy

Abstract

While the Lancefield whole blood killing assay is named after the renowned streptococcal researcher Rebecca Lancefield, the protocol was first described by Todd in 1927 (Br J Exp Pathol 8:1–5, 1927). Initially, the assay was used to identify novel Group A Streptococcal (GAS) serotypes through the supplementation of non-immune human blood (often from infants) with type-specific antisera prepared in rabbits (Lancefield, J Exp Med 106:525–544, 1957; Maxted, Br J Exp Pathol 37:415–422, 1956) and to demonstrate the impressive longevity of type-specific immunity in patients following invasive GAS infection (Lancefield, J Exp Med 110:271–292, 1959). The modern assay is routinely used to screen defined GAS mutants (Wessels, Bronze, Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A 91:12238–12242, 1994; Zinkernagel et al., Cell Host Microbe 4:170–178, 2008) or transposon libraries (Le Breton et al., Infect Immun 81:862-875, 2013) for enhanced susceptibility to opsonophagocytic killing or to screen vaccine antisera (Salehi et al., mSphere 3:e00617–e00618, 2018) or other serological preparations (Reglinski et al., Sci Rep 5:15825, 2015) for anti-streptococcal activity.