Background: An enzymatic immunoassay is under development by ARK Diagnostics, Inc for the quantification of plasma concentrations of linezolid (LZD). In this study, the authors aimed to assess the performance of this immunoassay using a validated high-performance liquid chromatography (HPLC) ultraviolet method as reference.
Methods: Within- and between-day in vitro inaccuracy and imprecision of the ARK LZD assay were firstly tested using spiked quality controls (QC) provided by the kit manufacturer. Subsequently, the performance of the immunoassay was verified in vivo by analyzing 170 trough LZD plasma samples from patients on antibiotic therapy.
Results: Imprecision of the spiked QCs resulted in every instance less than 7.0% and the inaccuracy ranged from -1.5% to 6.6%. The linear correlation between the 2 methods was documented by the Pearson analysis of plasma samples from patients on LZD therapy (coefficient = 0.9619). By Bland-Altman comparison, 8.2% of the patient samples resulted out of the limits ranging from -27.0% to +33.5%, with most of them having LZD concentrations exceeding 10 mg/L.
Conclusions: Acceptable analytical performance of the ARK LZD immunoassay has been demonstrated both with spiked QC and patients' samples, making it a viable alternative to HPLC for the therapeutic drug monitoring of LZD in clinical practice in laboratory hospitals that do not have HPLC equipment.