Performance of T-Track ® TB, a Novel Dual Marker RT-qPCR-Based Whole-Blood Test for Improved Detection of Active Tuberculosis

Tuberculosis (TB) is one of the leading causes of death by an infectious disease. It remains a major health burden worldwide, in part due to misdiagnosis. Therefore, improved diagnostic tests allowing the faster and more reliable diagnosis of patients with active TB are urgently needed. This prospective study examined the performance of the new molecular whole-blood test T-Track TB, which relies on the combined evaluation of and mRNA levels, and compared it to that of the QuantiFERON -TB Gold Plus (QFT-Plus) enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay (ELISA). Diagnostic accuracy and agreement analyses were conducted on the whole blood of 181 active TB patients and 163 non-TB controls. T-Track TB presented sensitivity of 94.9% and specificity of 93.8% for the detection of active TB vs. non-TB controls. In comparison, the QFT-Plus ELISA showed sensitivity of 84.3%. The sensitivity of T-Track TB was significantly higher ( < 0.001) than that of QFT-Plus. The overall agreement of T-Track TB with QFT-Plus to diagnose active TB was 87.9%. Out of 21 samples with discordant results, 19 were correctly classified by T-Track TB while misclassified by QFT-Plus (T-Track TB-positive/QFT-Plus-negative), and two samples were misclassified by T-Track TB while correctly classified by QFT-Plus (T-Track TB-negative/QFT-Plus-positive). Our results demonstrate the excellent performance of the T-Track TB molecular assay and its suitability to accurately detect TB infection and discriminate active TB patients from non-infected controls.