Related Experiment Video
Updated: Nov 9, 2025
Author Spotlight: Advancing Pathogen Diagnostics with Standardized LAMP
Published on: September 8, 2023
Clinical COVID-19 diagnostic methods: Comparison of reverse transcription loop-mediated isothermal amplification
Heita Kitajima1, Yoshitaka Tamura2, Hiroko Yoshida2
1Department of Infectious Diseases, Osaka Habikino Medical Center, Habikino, Osaka, 583-8588, Japan.
Background:
The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic is a major public health concern. Accurate and rapid diagnosis of COVID-19 is critical for disease control. Reverse transcription loop-mediated isothermal amplification (RT-LAMP) is a nucleic acid amplification assay similar to reverse transcription-polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR), the former being a simple, low cost, and rapid method.
Objectives:
This study aimed to compare the RT-LAMP assay with RT-PCR using the Loopamp™ SARS-CoV-2 Detection Kit.
Study Design:
One hundred and fifty-one nasopharyngeal swab and 88 sputum samples obtained from individuals with suspected or confirmed COVID-19 were examined.
Results:
RT-LAMP had high specificity (98.5 % (95 % CI: 96.9-100 %)), sensitivity (87.0 % (95 % CI: 82.8-91.3 %)), positive predictive value (97.9 % (95 % CI: 96.1-99.7 %)), negative predictive value (90.2 % (95 % CI: 86.4-94.0 %)), and concordance rate (93.3 % (95 % CI: 90.1-96.5 %)). Nasopharyngeal and sputum samples positive in RT-LAMP contained as few as 10.2 and 23.4 copies per 10 μL, respectively. RT-LAMP showed similar performance to RT-PCR for samples with cycle threshold value below 36.
Conclusions:
These results indicate that RT-LAMP is a highly reliable and at least equivalent to RT-PCR in utility, and potentially applicable in settings that are more diverse as a point-of-care tool.
