In-House Development, Standardization, and Validation of a RT-qPCR Assay for the Detection of SARS-CoV-2 Virus in Ecuador.

Abstract The World Health Organization (WHO) reported about 30 million cases of Severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) infection, and around 1 million deaths worldwide. Ecuador is the country with the highest mortality rate of confirmed cases in South America where both the poor ability to identify SARS-CoV-2 carriers and shortages in reagent supply have contributed the high infection rate observed. Hence, there is an urgent need to develop, standardize and validate an in-house protocol that cannot only reduces testing costs, but also increase the ability to screen widely the population. Primer-probe sets for the SARS-CoV-2 envelope protein E and the human ribonuclease P (RP) were validated for a duplex quantitative Reverse Transcription Polymerase Chain Reaction (RT-qPCR) for the Coronavirus Disease-19 (COVID-19) detection. Optimal E primers concentration was 400 nM and TaqMan probe 200 nM. The primer efficiency was set at 94.9% and R2 value at 0.99, which was comparable to commercial kits. The lower detection limit was found at 15 copies/ μL (50 copies/rx). In comparison to a Loop-mediated Isothermal Amplification (LAMP) commercial kit, there was a higher detection rate (30%) and results were highly reproducible (95%). We were able to develop a highly sensitive and low-cost duplex in-house RT-qPCR test for COVID-19 detection comparable to other commercially available kits.