Sensitive HPV genotyping based on the flow-through hybridization and gene chip

Persistent infection of high-risk human papillomavirus (HPV) has been recognized as the direct cause of cervical carcinoma. Therefore, detection and genotyping of HPV are important to cervical-cancer screening. In this study, we have evaluated the efficacy of flow-through hybridization and gene chip (HybriMax) on HPV genotyping through comparison of the results with Hybrid Capture II (HC-II) and in situ hybridization (ISH). 591 women were classified into 6 groups according to their histological diagnoses. The overall accordance rate on 13 types of HPV genotypes between HybriMax and HC-II were 92.5% and 100% in the cancer group. The overall accordance was excellent with the Kappa index (KI) of 0.814. The value of KI in each group was 0.750 (normal cytological diagnosis), 0.781 (chronic cervicitis), 0.80 (condyloma acuminatum), 0.755 (cervical intraepithelial neoplasia (CIN) I), 0.723 (CIN II), and 0.547 (CIN III) (0.75 > KI > 0.4, good; KI ≥ 0.75, excellent). The 10 most common HPV subtype detected by HybriMax were 16, 52/58, 18, 33, 31, 81, 53, 68, and 66 in patients, and 16, 68, 18, 52, 58, 11, 53, 31/39, and 33 in normal controls. In conclusion, HybriMax is an efficient method for HPV genotyping and more suitable for clinical use.