Approved

Roche's HIV viral load test, COBAS TaqMan HIV-1 Test v2.0, which this week was approved by the US Food and Drug Administration, will be made commercially available this year, the company says in a statement. The recently approved test "targets two highly conserved regions of the HIV-1 genome and avoids any regions which are current drug targets, thus providing increased reliability as compared to other single target assays should a mutation occur," Roche adds.

The test uses Roche's High Pure System Viral Nucleic Acid Kit for manual specimen preparation and the COBAS TaqMan 48 Analyzer for automated amplification and detection. The Sample's sister publication GenomeWeb Daily News has more.