EKF Diagnostics has announced that the viral transport medium PrimeStore MTM (Molecular Transport Medium) has been successfully evaluated for effective SARS-CoV-2 inactivation in a new study published by Public Health England.
To work safely with live SARS-CoV-2 samples requires the use of high-containment laboratories. However, after inactivation SARS-CoV-2 material can be handled at a lower containment level, allowing more laboratories to undertake testing and thereby increasing COVID-19 testing capacity.
The PHE study (Welch SR, Davies KA, Buczkowski H et al. Inactivation analysis of SARS-CoV-2 by specimen transport media, nucleic acid extraction reagents, detergents and fixatives. J Clin Microbiol 2020. In Press. [https://jcm.asm.org/content/early/2020/08/21/JCM.01713-20.long]) evaluated numerous commercially available reagents and laboratory formulations commonly used for viral inactivation protocols by public health agencies and research laboratories globally. All the reagents tested have been used during the current pandemic for sample transportation and subsequent molecular processing. A total of 23 commercial reagents designed for virus inactivation, clinical sample transportation and nucleic acid extraction were assessed by PHE for their ability to inactivate SARS-CoV-2.
Notably, the study showed that PrimeStore MTM was the only commercially available transport reagent from the many tested from which no residual virus was detectable by either TCID50 or by the passaging of treated purified sample. This demonstrates the efficacy and safety of PrimeStore MTM in inactivating live SARS-CoV-2 samples while maintaining the ability to detect the target viral RNA.