Towards the establishment of a consensus real-time qPCR to monitor Trypanosoma cruzi parasitemia in patients with chronic Chagas disease cardiomyopathy: A substudy from the BENEFIT trial

Establishment of a consensus real-time qPCR to compare Trypanosoma cruzi burden in blood of chronic cardiomyopathy Chagas disease patients from the BENEFIT clinical trial. [Display omitted] ► We established a SYBR Green real-time qPCR assay to quantify T. cruzi load in blood. ► Chronic Chagas cardiomyopathy patients from the BENEFIT trial were evaluated. ► The median parasitic load found in Brazilian patients was 0.1 parasite equivalents/mL. ► Chronic Chagas disease patients from Colombia and Argentina yielded parasitemia values roughly 20 times higher than patients from Brazil. ► qPCR is useful to detect and quantify low parasite burden in chronic Chagas disease. Quantitative real-time PCR (qPCR) is an accurate method to quantify Trypanosoma cruzi DNA and can be used to follow-up parasitemia in Chagas disease (CD) patients undergoing chemotherapy. The Benznidazole Evaluation for Interrupting Trypanosomiasis (BENEFIT) study is an international, multicenter, randomized, double-blinded and placebo-controlled clinical trial to evaluate the efficacy of benznidazole (BZ) treatment in patients with chronic Chagas cardiomyopathy (CCC). One important question to be addressed concerns the effectiveness of BZ in reducing overall parasite load in CCC patients, even in the absence of parasitological cure. This report describes the evaluation of multiple procedures for DNA extraction and qPCR-based protocols aiming to establish a standardized methodology for the absolute quantification of T. cruzi DNA in Guanidine-EDTA blood (GEB) samples. A panel of five primer sets directed to the T. cruzi nuclear satellite DNA repeats (Sat-DNA) and to the minicircle DNA conserved regions (kDNA) was compared in either SYBR Green or TaqMan systems. Standard curve parameters such as, amplification efficiency, coefficient of determination and intercept were evaluated, as well as different procedures to generate standard samples containing pre-established T. cruzi DNA concentration. Initially, each primer set was assayed in a SYBR Green qPCR to estimate parasite load in GEB samples from chronic Chagas disease patients. The results achieved from Bayesian transmutability analysis elected the primer sets Cruzi1/Cruzi2 (p=0.0031) and Diaz7/Diaz8 (p=0.0023) coupled to the QIAamp DNA Kit extraction protocol (silica gel column), as the most suitable for monitoring parasitemia in these patients. Comparison between the parasite burden of 150 GEB samples of BENEFIT patients from Argentina, Brazil