ELISpot and FluoroSpot in Ebola Research
Published: May 25, 2026
2 minute read
Authored by: Jens Gertow
With the WHO declaring the current Ebola outbreak in DRC and Uganda a public health emergency of international concern, the urgency of filovirus immunology research has never been sharper. No approved vaccine is yet available, which means the field needs assay tools that hold up across the full translational spectrum, from characterizing immunity in survivors to evaluating candidates in Phase I trials.
Mabtech ELISpot and FluoroSpot kits have been used at each of those stages.
Published evidence across the research pipeline
Survivor cohort studies. A landmark paper in The Lancet Infectious Diseases (Thom et al., 2020) used Mabtech ELISpot to characterize glycoprotein-specific T cell responses in 116 Ebola virus disease survivors in Guinea. The data generated key mechanistic insights into the durability of protective cellular immunity following natural infection.
With no approved vaccine yet available, characterizing the T cell response to this pathogen – in survivors, mouse challenge models, and Phase I clinical volunteers – has become one of the defining challenges of filovirus immunology.
Pre-clinical vaccine models. A pan-filovirus challenge study published in PLoS Pathogens (Rahim et al., 2019) applied Mabtech FluoroSpot to evaluate vaccine-elicited T cell responses in mice. The approach demonstrated complete protection against both Ebola and Marburg viruses, illustrating the kit's sensitivity for detecting polyfunctional antigen-specific responses in small-animal models.
Phase I clinical trials. At the clinical end of the pipeline, an NIH Vaccine Research Center study in the Journal of Infectious Diseases (Sarwar et al., 2015) selected Mabtech ELISpot as the primary immunogenicity readout for Ebolavirus and Marburgvirus DNA vaccine candidates in human subjects.
A validated platform for filovirus immunology
Regulatory agencies and peer reviewers increasingly expect assay platforms with a documented publication record. Across survivor cohorts, animal challenge models, and human trials, Mabtech kits have been the tool researchers reached for when precise quantification of antigen-specific T cell responses was needed.
If you are working on the immune response to Ebola or filovirus vaccine development, we would be glad to support your work.