Evaluation of the Abbott ARCHITECT Chagas prototype assay

Serologic tests are established tools for the diagnosis of Chagas disease applied to support a safe blood supply in endemic countries. However, sensitivity and specificity of most commercially available enzyme-linked immunosorbent assays (ELISAs) are not regarded as adequate enough to rely on a single assay to determine the Trypanosoma cruzi infection status of a blood donor or a patient. The overall assay performance is driven by the general choice of antigens and the actual antigen cocktail provided in the test. In this report we describe key performance data of the Abbott ARCHITECT Chagas prototype assay in comparison to the well-recognized bioMérieux ELISA cruzi assay. The ARCHITECT assay demonstrated superior specificity (99.99% versus 99.93%) and sensitivity (99.85% versus 98.38%), along with excellent precision, thus showing the potential to serve as single assay to determine the T. cruzi status of a given blood unit or diagnostic specimen on a fully automated instrument platform.