AACC showcases research on fingerstick Ebola test
Research presented at the 2015 AACC Annual Meeting and Clinical Lab Expo will expand on the studies that led to a fingerstick Ebola test becoming the first and only rapid diagnostic for this disease to receive approval from the World Health Organization.
The Viral Hemorrhagic Fever Consortium, which is led by Tulane University and the diagnostic company Corgenix, developed the rapid test. Called the ReEBOV Antigen Rapid Test Kit, this test uses a few drops of blood and the same technology used in at-home pregnancy tests to provide results in 15 minutes. In comparison, the current gold standard test for Ebola, qRT-PCR, can take up to a day to return a diagnosis.
Matt Boisen, program director of Infectious Diseases and Emerging Technologies at Corgenix and development director of in vitro diagnostics at the Viral Hemorrhagic Fever Consortium, will present the findings of two studies by WHO and Corgenix, respectively, demonstrating ReEBOV’s efficacy. The WHO study, conducted in Ebola-hotspot Sierra Leone, compares ReEBOV’s performance with that of qRT-PCR.
By testing 292 stored patient samples with both methods, researchers found that ReEBOV performed nearly as well as the gold standard, and agreed with qRT-PCR on 91.8 percent of infected samples and 84.6 percent of noninfected samples. ReEBOV’s accuracy was also recently confirmed by a third, separate study published in The Lancet. This means that ReEBOV could be used as a complement to qRT-PCR, enabling health care workers to act immediately on potential Ebola cases without having to wait for the qRT-PCR results to come in.