Evaluation of the new LCx HIV RNA quantitative assay: comparison with the Cobas Amplicor HIV Monitor Assay

In the present study we evaluated the performance of the new LCx HIV RNA quantitative kit (Abbott Laboratories, Delkenheim, Germany) for the quantitative detection of HIV-1 RNA in human plasma in comparison to the Cobas Amplicor HIV-1 Monitor assay (Roche Diagnostics, Branchburg, N.J.), including samples containing a variety of HIV-1 subtypes. LCx and Cobas were compared using archived EDTA plasma samples collected from HIV-infected patients. Considering the lower limit of the linear range of 50 copies/ml, the detection rate of the LCx was 139 out of 174 (79.9%) versus 131 out of 174 (75.3%) of the Cobas. Overall agreement was 95.4% (166/174) at a cut-off of 50 copies. LCx and Cobas results on clinical samples were found linearly associated (r(2)=0.900) and strongly correlated (r =0.949). The mean viral load in the 174 frozen patient samples was 3.25 log(10) copies/ml by LCx compared to 2.71 log(10) copies/ml by Cobas. Considering only samples with a viral load >50 copies/ml, the average difference was -0.132 log copy/ml. Using a panel consisting of 9 plasma samples spiked with 9 different HIV-1 cultured isolates (A-H, and O) LCx detected the 9 subtypes with a high degree of precision, i.e., 9-33% coefficient of variation. As expected, the Cobas failed to detect the group O isolates. The results of the retraining samples showed a higher degree of variation (when testing four replicates of the subtype panel) than the LCx of 14.2-40.3%. Nevertheless, the results were comparable with the LCx data.