Development and validation of a simple and rapid way to generate low volume of plasma to be used in point-of-care HIV virus load technologies

Publication date: Available online 21 November 2019Source: The Brazilian Journal of Infectious DiseasesAuthor(s): Isabelle Vasconcellos, Diana Mariani, Marcelo C.V.M. de Azevedo, Orlando C. Ferreira, Amilcar TanuriAbstractA new point-of-care (POC) HIV virus load (VL), mPIMA HIV-1/2 VL, Abbott, USA, has been recently developed. This POC VL requires no skilled person to run and uses a small plasma volume (50 μL). However, obtaining 50 μL of plasma can be a challenge in limited resource settings. We validated a simple and easy method to obtain enough amount of plasma to run a POC VL. The study utilized 149 specimens from patients failing antiretroviral therapy. At least 250 μL of whole blood was collected in a microtube/EDTA from fingerstick (fs-plasma) and immediately centrifuged. Parallel collection of venous blood to obtain plasma (vp-plasma) was used to compare performance in a POC VL assay and in methodology used in centralized laboratories Abbott M2000, Abbott, USA. The procedure for plasma collection takes less than 10 min and in 94% of the cases only one fingerstick was sufficient to collect at least 250 μL of blood. The Pearson correlation coefficient value for vp-plasma versus fs-plasma ran on mPIMA was 0.990. The Bland–Altman mean difference (md) for this comparison were virtually zero (md = −0.001) with limits of agreement between −0.225 and 0.223. In addition, the Pearson correlation coefficient value for fs-plasma in mPI...
Source: The Brazilian Journal of Infectious Diseases - Category: Infectious Diseases Source Type: research