XMRV Tests Now Offered by WPI Lab (UNEVX), Not VIP Dx Anymore

[JT1024]

There are NO FDA approved tests for HGRV.

Geez - most can't even find it!

[Tango]

I think we need to be patient with WPI and UNEVX. People need to realize the complexity of the testing and the challenges that WPI/UNEVX are facing.

While XMRV from Silverman's labs may have been contamination, that does not appear to be the case at WPI.  Also, developing tests on a newly discovered family of viruses  is daunting.  WPI has been consistently trying to help PATIENTS while other organizations have had different agendas.

Companies like Abbott, Gen-Probe, Roche, and Chronix have spent significant resources on "XMRV".  With their vast resources, they still do not have a commercial FDA approved test so to expect the WPI/VIPDx/UNEVX to have all the answers at this point is absurd.

As I have stated previously, when new information is revealed and better testing is developed, old test methods are abandoned.  This is standard in the world of laboratory testing. Recent presentations I've attended (Autoimmune Disease testing, C. difficile PCR, and Agents of Bioterrorism) brought to light the history, missteps, and continual refinement in laboratory testing.

None of them had the sense to use a clinically positive samples to optimise to though.

[Stuart]

I feel ya, Stuart.

Now it's gone, too.

We are going to have to be ok with the enormous uncertainty of all of this -- at least for a while.  We have already weathered so much, we can weather this.

Well, at least they are watching us!   

[MEkoan]

Well, at least they are watching us!   

Everyone is.

[Wildaisy]

http://treatingxmrv.blogspot.com/2011/10/square-one.html#comments

I think what the BWG results mean is that all the XMRV/HGRV testing done at VIP Dx has been and is now null and void. Keep in mind that Dr. Mikovits works at the WPI research lab, which is a separate lab from the clinical, commercially-oriented VIP Dx lab. She believes that she has reproduced her original work many times and found evidence of infection in the patients who were previously found XMRV positive. But she never found any single patient positive on every date tested by every assay. So there has been an assumption that there were false negatives in the WPI research lab for some time. Another important thing to keep in mind is that WPI routinely used several tests on each sample, whereas VIP Dx used different, more limited testing, on the samples they received, testing that apparently was never truly validated against WPI methods or performed with appropriate controls. I personally don't know why this was the case or how it happened. Obviously the decision to sell a test was a very poor one, hindsight being 20/20. It left the institute with a difficult conflict of interest.
 
 

[Tango]

I was told that the BWG specimens were being run in both the WPI research lab and the VIP Dx clinical lab.

We can described the differences in the assays.

The VipDx tests are the Lombardi validated ones. 

The BWG assays are not the VipDx/Lombardi ones, except when they helped out with the BWG.  As they were not permitted to use those tests.