Guava's HIV/AIDS monitoring system
Results from a multi-site study evaluating two new assays from Guava Technologies that dramatically lower the cost and difficulty of AIDS diagnosis and treatment monitoring were presented at the 15th Inter-national AIDS Conference, held July 11 - 17 in Bangkok, Thailand.
Results from a multi-site study evaluating two new assays from Guava Technologies that dramatically lower the cost and difficulty of AIDS diagnosis and treatment monitoring were presented at the 15th Inter-national AIDS Conference, held July 11 - 17 in Bangkok, Thailand.
Data from three separate study sites showed that results obtained using the Guava EasyCD4 and EasyCD8 Assays for the enumeration of Human CD4+ T cells and CD8+ T cells showed excellent correlation with the standard, clinically approved BD MultiTEST (flow cytometry) assay. Moreover, assay reproducibility both within-site and between-sites for the Guava assays was excellent.
Study results were provided by investigators from the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF), the Gladstone Institute of Virology and Immunology, Cali-fornia Department of Health Services, and Guava Technologies. They were presented at the satellite symposium organised by the Forum for Collaborative HIV Research and entitled: 'HIV Monitoring Technologies for Resource-Limited Settings.'
'With many resource-limited areas of the world now gaining access to more affordable anti-retroviral therapies, simpler and less costly methods of monitoring treatment - including absolute CD4+ and CD8+ T cell counts - are urgently needed,' said Dr Barry Bredt, director of core laboratories, General Clinical Research Center, UCSF/San Francisco General Hospital. 'Our results suggest that the EasyCD4 and EasyCD8 assays represent good lower cost alterna-tives to approved flow cytometry methods of CD4+ and CD8+ T cell enumeration. The Guava assays offer comparable accuracy and reproducibility to the flow cytometry-based method, but are much simpler and more affordable to use.'
Absolute CD4+ and CD8+ T cell counts are measurements used to monitor disease progression in HIV/AIDS patients, to determine when to begin treat-ment with antiretroviral drugs and to monitor a patient's response to treatment. In resource limited countries, the cost of commercially available CD4 diagnostic testing, whether by "gold standard" flow cytometry or less accurate manual microscopy-based methods, has remained very high. The Guava EasyCD4 system can dramatically change that and potentially enable improvements in quality of care and even quality of life for the millions of HIV+ patients in these countries.