New Proteins for a New Perspective on Syphilis Diagnosis
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Syphilis is a sexually transmitted disease caused by Treponema pallidum subsp. pallidum; it can be effectively treated with penicillin yet remains prevalent worldwide, due in part to the shortcomings of current diagnostic tests. Here we report the production of soluble recombinant versions of three novel diagnostic candidate proteins, Tp0326, Tp0453, and a Tp0453-Tp0326 chimera. The sensitivities of these recombinant proteins were assessed by screening characterized serum samples from primary, secondary, and latent stages of infection (n = 169). The specificities were assessed by screening false positives identified with the standard diagnostic testing algorithm (n = 21), samples from patients with potentially cross-reactive infections (Leptospira spp., Borrelia burgdorferi, Helicobacter pylori, Epstein-Barr virus, hepatitis B virus, hepatitis C virus, or cytomegalovirus) (n = 38), and samples from uninfected individuals (n = 11). The sensitivities of Tp0326, Tp0453, and the Tp0453-Tp0326 chimera were found to be 86%, 98%, and 98%, respectively, and the specificities were 99%, 100%, and 99%. In a direct comparison, the Captia syphilis (T. pallidum)-G enzyme immunoassay (Trinity Biotech) was used to screen the same serum samples and was found to have a sensitivity of 98% and a specificity of 90%. In particular, Tp0453 and the chimera exhibited superior accuracy in classifying analytical false-positive samples (100%, compared to 43% for the Captia assay). These findings identify Tp0453 and the Tp0453-Tp0326 chimera as novel syphilis-specific diagnostic candidates that surpass the performance of a currently available diagnostic enzyme immunoassay test for syphilis and that allow accurate detection of all stages of infection.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".