In many hospitals across the country, coordinating transplant donors and recipients can be a difficult task. Another critical component of dealing with transplant patients is monitoring these patients post-transplant to optimize anti-viral therapy. Cytomegalovirus (CMV) is a virus that is usually asymptomatic in most healthy individuals, occuring in a latent state. In transplant patients, however, CMV can be re-activated and could lead to fever, leucopenia, hepatitis, colitis, organ damage, psychomotor problems, deafness, as well as vision and neurological problems.
A standard method of monitoring CMV has been the antigenemia assay (antibody-based), but this method is less than ideal, due to its poor sensitivity and laborious protocol. More recently, using real-time PCR assays has become a more popular and sensitive method for monitoring active CMV infection. Early and accurate monitoring of infection is critically important in transplant patients for effective anti-CMV therapy. Anti-viral drugs like Gancyclovir administered to transplant patients are expensive and can cause adverse side effects. By monitoring CMV infections using these real-time assays, clinicians can increase the efficiency of this treatment, decrease costs of unnecessary treatment and improve patient care.
Tosoh is investigating the clinical utility of a real-time, nucleic acid-based assay for CMV monitoring, called the TRC-CMV assay. If you would like more information, please call 1-800-695-6550, ext. 8117.
