Keeping Tabs on AIDS Virus Changes

As treatments for HIV have grown more robust over two decades, so have diagnostics to measure progress against the disease. In May, the Food and Drug Administration approved Abbott Laboratories' RealTime HIV-1 viral load test, the only available molecular diagnostic test that can detect common and variant subtypes of the virus.

"Just as clinicians were gaining a high degree of confidence that most patients with HIV infection could be treated and monitored successfully with drug therapies, they now face the troubling emergence of variant subtypes," said John Robinson, senior director of research and development with Abbott's Molecular division. "According to some studies, these infections may represent up to 10 percent of HIV infections in certain areas of the United States and have important implications for HIV-1 diagnostics and patient management."

The test and Abbott's automated m2000 lab equipment are used to measure all viral strains in a patient's blood, helping clinicians determine if a treatment regimen is controlling the patient's infection. The m2000 system can detect minute levels of virus in the blood, said Scott Safar, senior director of systems development and engineering for Abbott Molecular.

In the lab, technicians automatically load tubes containing blood samples onto the system, which detects a patient-specific barcode. The barcode eliminates manual data processing in the lab, reducing the chance of errors. The m2000 system purifies the nucleic acid from a sample and contains software used for the quantitative lab report.

The system can produce 96 results each shift, a high volume that helps hospital labs produce quicker results for physicians, said Safar. In comparison, 24 tests could be performed manually and 72 can be done by other automated methods, he said.

Back to other news for October 2007