Clinical COVID-19 diagnostic methods: Comparison of reverse transcription loop-mediated isothermal amplification (RT-LAMP) and quantitative RT-PCR (qRT-PCR)

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.