Table 6.: Ease of Use and Characteristics Relating to Instrumentation, Extent to which they are Automated, Use of Primary Tubes, Pipetting Steps and Connectivity with the LIS, of Five Commercially Available Viral Load Assays

Abbott RealTime HIV-1 (m2000rt) COBAS® AmpliPrep/COBAS® TaqMan HIV-1, v2.0 (Roche) NucliSens® EasyQ HIV-1 v1.2 (bioMérieux) VERSANT® HIV-1 RNA 1.0 (kPCR) (Siemens) Artus HIVirus-1 QS-RGQ (Qiagen)
Instrumentation m2000sp + integrated computer and m2000rt + integrated computer COBAS Ampliprep + TaqMan 48 + computer EasyMAG (extraction) + computer and EasyQ + computer Sample extraction module (SP module) + amplification and detection module (AD module) QIAsymphony SP/AS + Rotor-Gene Q + integrated computer
Ease of use Fully automated, very easy to load. Automated extraction equipment separate from amplification/detection equipment Simple to use, very easy to load. Equipment integrated onto one platform Easy to use. Automated extraction equipment separate from amplification/detection equipment, manual pipetting of master mix Fully automated. Extraction equipment separate from amplification/detection equipment Automated extraction equipment separate from amplification/detection equipment
Reading of primary tube by barcode Yes No Yes Yes Yes
Pipetting steps Add the internal control to the extraction buffer prior to loading the reagents Pipetting of the samples into the Roche equipment tubes Additional pipetting steps during the extraction and amplification Not required Preparation of the internal control-RNA carrier mixture
Connection to LIS2 Yes, bidirectional Yes, bidirectional Yes, bidirectional Yes, bidirectional Yes, bidirectional

2 LIS - laboratory information system.