Comparison of a new in-house HIV-1 TaqMan real-time PCR and three commercial HIV-1 RNA quantitative assays.

Objectives: The aim of this study was to compare the analytical performance of an In-House HIV-1 viral load determination technique with three commercial kits including COBAS AmpliPrep, RealStar, and RTA HIV-1 Real-Time PCR.

Results: A total of 100 HIV-1 suspicious plasma samples were tested by the In-House TaqMan Real-Time PCR assay along with the above-mentioned kits. Comparative analysis between In-House and reference method (COBAS AmpliPrep/COBAS TaqMan HIV-1 Test version 2.0) showed high concordance with a mean difference of 0.08 log copies/ml. All samples results were within -0.16-0.31 log copies/ml. A suitable correlation was obtained with a coefficient (R) of 0.82 between the In-House assay and RTA Kit, however, two positive samples were not detected. The lowest agreement was detected with RealStar HIV Kit 1.0 (R = 0.49, r = 0.7).

Conclusions: The newly developed method has suitable sensitivity, accuracy, and precision. In addition, it is cost-effective and can be an alternative in all laboratories.