Clinical validation of the Cobas 4800 HPV assay using cervical samples in SurePath medium under the VALGENT4...

The VALidation of HPV Genotyping Tests (VALGENT) framework is an international cooperation designed for comparison and clinical validation of HPV assays with genotyping capabilities.

Here we addressed the accuracy of the Roche cobas 4800 HPV test using SurePath samples from the Danish cervical cancer screening program under the VALGENT framework.

The VALGENT4 panel comprises 998 consecutive SurePath cervical samples from routine screening and 297 SurePath samples enriched for disease (100 ASC-US, 100 LSIL, 97 HSIL). The cobas HPV test is a real-time PCR assay which detects HPV16 and 18 individually and 12 other high-risk (hr) HPV genotypes in one bulk.

The clinical performance of the cobas test was assessed relative to that of the comparator assay GP5+/6 + PCR Enzyme ImmunoAssay (GP-EIA) by a non-inferiority test. The relative sensitivity for ≥ CIN2 was 1.00 (95% CI: 0.97-1.04) and relative specificity for the control group was 1.02 (95% CI: 1.01-1.04). The cobas test was found non-inferior to that of GP-EIA for both sensitivity and specificity (p-0.0006 and p < 0.0001, respectively). The type specific performance of the cobas test was evaluated using the GP5+/6 + PCR with Luminex genotyping (GP-LMNX) as comparator. The cobas test showed excellent to good concordance (Kappa: 0.70 to 0.90) with GP-LMNX for all three genotype groups in the overall VALGENT population but good to moderate concordance in the Screening population (kappa from 0.56 to 0.80).

The cobas HPV test demonstrated non-inferiority to the comparator assay on cervical SurePath screening samples using the VALGENT4 panel.