Comparison of four commercial viral load techniques in an area of non-B HIV-1 subtypes circulation

The aim of this study was to compare four HIV-1 viral quantitation platforms, Nuclisens EasyQ v2.0 ® (EQ), COBAS AmpliPreP/Cobas Taqman ® HIV-1 test v 2.0 (CTM), GENERIC HIV CHARGE VIRALE ® (GEN), with Abbott Real Time HIV-1 ® (m2000sp/rt) as reference technique. The study had first evaluated m2000sp/rt performances and then compared quantitation between techniques. Discordant samples were genotyped on gag and pol gene and sequences were analyzed using Sequence locator and SeqPublish to detect eventual mismatches. Performance analysis of m2000sp/rt showed good results with coefficients of variation values (CV) of 1.35%, 0.65%, and 0.54% for repeatability testing of low, intermediate and high concentrations, respectively. Reproducibility tests showed low CV values with 2.36% and 1.42% for low and high concentration levels, respectively and contamination test was very low value with 0.94%. Correlation and concordance between techniques ranged from r 2 = 0.98 and bias = −0.00185 (for m 2000sp/rt vs CTM) to r 2 = 0.90 and bias = −0.135 (for EQ vs GEN). Discrepancies were observed on 37 samples mostly CRF02_AG but despite some mismatches, sequence analysis (26/37) did not show any remarkable differences between CRF02_AG queries and references. This study showed good correlation and good concordance between techniques. However, EQ yielded under-quantitation of CRF02_AG.