Comparison of Luminex NxTAG Respiratory Pathogen Panel and xTAG Respiratory Viral Panel FAST Version 2 for the Detection of Respiratory Viruses

Lee, Chun Kiat; Lee, Hong Kai; Ng, Christopher Wei Siong; Chiu, Lily; Tang, Julian Wei-Tze; Loh, Tze Ping; Koay, Evelyn Siew-Chuan

In December 2015, Luminex introduced the NxTAG respiratory pathogen panel (NxTAG RPP), following approval from United States Food and Drug Administration. Both the NxTAG RPP and xTAG RVP FAST v2 have the same number of viral targets, including influenza A virus (A/H3N2, A/H1N1, and A/H1N1/2009 strains), influenza B virus, parainfluenza virus types 1 to 4 (PIV 1-4), enterovirus/rhinovirus, coronaviruses (OC43, NL63, 229E, and HKU1), respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) A and B, metapneumovirus, adenovirus, and bocavirus. The NxTAG RPP has two additional atypical bacterial targets, namely Mycoplasma pneumoniae and Chlamydophila pneumoniae. Recent studies have compared the performance of the new NxTAG RPP with that of other respiratory panels such as the BioFire FilmArray RVP [3, 4] , RespiFinder-22 [5] , Anyplex II RV16 [6] , and xTAG RVP FAST v2 [7] . Overall, these reports demonstrated that the NxTAG RPP is at least comparable to, if not better than, some of the comparators. Here, we assessed the clinical performance of the This study was approved by the local institutional ethics board (National Healthcare Group Domain-Specific Review Board A, reference: 2016/00044) and was performed between May and December 2015. Here, 142 de-identified clinical respiratory samples submitted to the Molecular Diagnosis Centre of the Singapore National University Hospital were included (see Table 1 for the list of viral pathogens included). Additionally, 12 external quality assessment (EQA) samples from the College of American Pathologists (CAP) infectious disease respiratory panel, received in year 2015, were tested ( Table 2) . Total nucleic acid was extracted with the Qiagen EZ1 Virus Mini Kit v2.0 on the BioRobot EZ1 extractor (Qiagen, Hilden, Germany).