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Updated: Jul 2, 2025
Demonstrating a Multi-drug Resistant Mycobacterium tuberculosis Amplification Microarray
Published on: April 25, 2014
A comparative study of MassARRAY and GeneXpert assay in detecting rifampicin resistance in tuberculosis patients'
Ruixia Liang1, Jiankang Li1, Yue Zhao2
1Tuberculosis Department, Henan Chest Hospital, Zhengzhou, China.
Objectives:
Matrix-assisted laser desorption ionization-time of flight mass spectrometry (MALDI-TOF MS) has emerged as a potent tool for detecting drug resistance in tuberculosis (TB); however, concerns about its reliability have been raised. In this study, we assessed the reliability of MassARRAY (Sequenom, Inc.), which is a MALDI-TOF MS-based method, by comparing it to the well-established GeneXpert assay (Cepheid) as a reference method.
Methods:
A retrospective study was conducted using laboratory data retrieved from Henan Chest Hospital (Zhengzhou, China). To ensure a rigorous evaluation, we adopted a comprehensive assessment approach by integrating multiple outcomes of the Xpert assay across various specimen types.
Results:
Among the 170 enrolled TB cases, MassARRAY demonstrated significantly higher sensitivity (85.88%, 146 of 170) compared to the Xpert assay (76.62%, 118 of 154) in TB diagnosis (p < 0.05). The concordance in detecting rifampicin resistance between MassARRAY and the combined outcomes of the Xpert assay was 90%, while it was 97.37% (37 of 38) among smear-positive cases and 89.06% (57 of 64) among culture-positive cases. When compared to the phenotypic susceptibility outcomes of the 12 included drugs, consistency rates of 81.8 to 93.9% were obtained, with 87.9% for multiple drug resistance (MDR) identification.
Conclusion:
MassARRAY demonstrates high reliability in detecting rifampicin resistance, and these findings may offer a reasonable basis for extrapolation to other drugs included in the test panel.
