Clinical performance of a new intact FGF23 immunoassay in healthy individuals and patients with chronic hypophosphatemia

While the positive association between automated intact fibroblast growth factor (FGF) 23 measurement kit (Determinar CL FGF23 [CL]) and the former assay (Kainos [KI]), and clinical utility of CL was well established, the clinical performance of Medfrontier FGF23 (MED), which was the manual intact FGF23 measurement kit with same antibody set as CL, has not yet been validated. Therefore, this study aims to compare MED FGF23 levels to KI FGF23 levels. A total of 380 samples were collected from healthy individuals, and 200 samples were collected from 20 patients with chronic hypophosphatemia. The intact FGF23 level of each sample was measured by KI and MED. Among the healthy individuals, the reference range of MED FGF23 levels was 18.6–59.8 pg/mL when calculated as the average ± 2 standard deviations. When compared with KI FGF23 levels, MED FGF23 levels were lower than KI levels both among samples from healthy individuals (KI FGF23, 40.9 [interquartile (IQR), 31.1–50.6]; MED FGF23, 38.0 [IQR, 31.5–45.7]; p value = 0.02) and among samples from patients with chronic hypophosphatemia (KI FGF23, 172.5 [IQR, 115.8–290.7]; MED FGF23, 130.2 [IQR, 93.6–247.0]; p value = 0.003). The linear regression analysis showed that the correlation between KI FGF23 and MED FGF23 was interpreted as a slope of 0.83 with a y-intercept of 0.53, revealing good linearity (R2 = 0.99). This study showed that the discrepancy between KI and MED was very similar to the previously reported data between KI and CL. •MED is a manual FGF23 assay kit with the same antibodies as an automated kit (CL).•FGF23 levels were compared between MED and a previous assay (KI).•Samples from healthy individuals and those with hypophosphatemia were measured.•The discrepancy between MED and KI was similar to that between CL and KI.•The clinical performance of MED was almost equal to that of CL.