Type 1 diabetes (T1D) is regarded as an autoimmune disease. Beta cells, which produces insulin in pancreas are attacked by islet cell antibodies (ICA). This leads to gradual destruction of the beta cell, which in turn cause high level of glucose in the blood because the regulator "insulin" has disappeared. In that case the patient needs to be treated lifelong with insulin. It has been shown that the ICA reactivity consisting of reactivities against different autoantigens such as: insulin autoantigen (IAA), glutamic acid autoantigen (GAD), insulinoma antigen-2 autoantigen (IA-2) and most likely also zinc transporter autoantigen (ZnT8). Determination of ICA in serum samples is important for the classification of diabetes, prediction of T1D and the development of autoimmune therapies.

Nowadays screening of ICA is performed with ”Medipan ICA screen” which is a commercial enzyme- linked immunosorbent assay (ELISA). Positives samples are further analysed by ELISA with the indirect immunofluorescence method (IF) to ensure a final positive answer.

The purpose of this study was to evaluate and compare a new commercial ELISA kit ”RSR 2screen” with the Medipan ICA screen for use it in routine analysis to evalute if it has the same / higher specificity and sensitivity, and lower price compared with Medipan ICA screen.

Serum samples from a control group (n = 199) and a patient’s group diagnosed with T1D (n = 100 were analyzed with both ELISA methods. The results were statistically evaluated to set a threshold value for positivity and to evaluate the method's sensitivity and specificity. The result showed that both ELISA- methods gave the same sensitivity (93%) and specificity (97.5%) and a high concordance (98.7%) was achieved. Analytical price per sample for the RSR 2screen was 4.2% lower than for the Medipan ICA screen. RSR 2screen can be used instead of Medipan ICA screen.