Evaluation of a lateral-flow nanoparticle fluorescence assay for TB infection diagnosis

• DOI: 10.5588/ijtld.21.0391
• Publication Date: 2021-10-23T04:38:56Z
• Authors: F. Stieber; J. Howard; D. Manissero; J. Boyle; N. Ndunda; J. Love; M. Yang; A. Schumacher; R. Uchiyama; S. Parsons; C. Miller; H. Douwes; Z. Mielens; T. Laing; V. Nikolayevskyy
• Keywords: 0303 health sciences; 03 medical and health sciences; Latent Tuberculosis; Tuberculin Test; Humans; Mass Screening; Nanoparticles; Original Articles; Interferon-gamma Release Tests; 3. Good health

BACKGROUND: Programmatic management of TB infection is a critical component of the WHO End TB Strategy. Interferon-gamma release assays (IGRAs) overcome some limitations of the tuberculin skin test, but implementation of IGRA testing in low-resource settings is challenging.METHODS: In this feasibility study, we evaluated performance of a novel digital lateral-flow assay, the QIAreach® QuantiFERON® TB (QIAreach-QFT) test, against the QuantiFERON®-TB Gold Plus (QFT-Plus) assay. A population with a mix of risk factors for TB infection (111 donors) were sampled over multiple days. A total of 207 individual blood samples were tested according to the manufacturer´s instructions.RESULTS: The overall percentage agreement was 95.6% (two-sided 95% CI 91.8–98), with a positive percentage agreement (i.e., sensitivity) of 100% (95% CI 94.7–100) and a negative percentage agreement (i.e., specificity) of 95.6% (95% CI 90.6–98.4). All QFT-Plus positive specimens with TB1-Nil and TB2-Nil values less than 1 IU/ml tested positive on QIAreach-QFT.CONCLUSIONS: QIAreach QFT is a deployable, accurate testing solution for decentralised testing. It has the potential to overcome key hurdles for TB infection screening in high-burden settings thus helping to achieve the WHO End TB programme goals.