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Recent outbreaks of African Swine Fever Virus (ASFV) in Eastern Europe have led to the growing need for more accurate diagnostics to help identify and monitor the highly contagious pathogen for which no treatment or vaccine currently exists. Scientists from Thermo Fisher Scientific have presented research data from a new duplex real-time PCR kit that demonstrates the ability to accurately detect the virus with high sensitivity and specificity in animal samples.
Results of the Applied Biosystems LSI VetMAX African Swine Fever Virus Detection Kit showed 100 percent sensitivity in all tested sample materials, including blood, serum and tissues, and 100 percent specificity. No cross reaction was found with other pathogens, and a serial dilution of the ASFV target sequence led to a limit of detection (LOD) of 16 genome copies per PCR reaction. The kit fulfills all the validation criteria for PCR characteristics and the complete method conforms to the requirements described in the French norm NF U47A-600.
“African Swine Fever Virus is a complex virus that can’t be identified from classical swine fever, by either clinical or post-mortem examination,” said Sandrine Moine, R&D manager at Thermo Fisher Scientific, first author of the study presented at the Annual Meeting of the Society for Veterinary Epidemiology and Preventive Medicine (SVEPM) in March. “Since there is no vaccine or treatment, we felt it was of the utmost importance to develop a highly sensitive and accurate diagnostic test to help monitor and control the disease in animals. The LSI VetMAX African Swine Fever Virus Detection Kit provides a useful tool for early detection of the ASFV in pigs and wild boars as well as to confirm a clinical diagnosis.”
To demonstrate the accuracy of the LSI VetMAX African Swine Fever Virus Detection Kit, Thermo Fisher conducted field studies in France and the Netherlands with samples from Spain, the Netherlands and Germany. Researchers tested about 1,600 negative samples from ASFV-free regions in Germany and Spain and 33 different pathogens other than ASFV to demonstrate analytical specificity of the assay. Additionally, about 100 samples from Africa and Eastern Europe previously identified as ASFV-positive* were tested to determine the test’s sensitivity.
May 2, 2016 - Thermo Fisher
