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Rapid PCR rules as labs ready flu arsenal

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Anne Paxton

December 2018—With the memory of the 2017–2018 “high-severity” influenza season fresh in mind—49 million cases, 960,000 hospitalizations, a marginally effective vaccine, 79,000 deaths—clinical laboratories have been bracing for the customary annual surge in emergency room, outpatient clinic, and physician office influenza test orders. Although flu admissions have been rising somewhat, it is too soon to know how the season will play out, but laboratories are hoping for a season closer to average.

Avoiding a repeat of last year’s travails—lengthy turnaround times, supply shortages, and the need to triage patients for testing—is a must, many laboratory directors say. “We had difficulty keeping up with last year’s demand. It was extremely time-consuming,” says Mary Kay O’Connor, national laboratory director at Summit Health Management, the management arm of the Summit Medical Group, an 800-provider practice on the East Coast.

Mary Kay O’Connor of Summit Health Management. The core laboratory of Summit Medical Group performed the influenza testing in the 2017– 2018 season. Now rapid PCR instruments are being put into all of the locations that do strep and influenza testing. [Photo:Jennifer Altman]

It was SMG’s core laboratory that performed the group’s influenza testing last season: about 285 tests a day during the height of the season. “At that time we did not utilize point of care because we did not believe the antigen tests were accurate enough,” O’Connor explains.

In midseason, O’Connor and colleagues realized that SMG would need to switch instruments due to high volume. “We had already been evaluating the Roche Diagnostics Cobas Liat and we could get reagents from Roche, so we switched to the Liat. But even with 10 analyzers running 16 to 18 hours a day straight, we still had difficulty keeping up with an efficient turnaround time.”

Now, SMG is poised for a more sweeping change. “We are putting Roche Diagnostics rapid PCR Liats in all of the testing locations that do strep and influenza testing, so they will do the molecular test on site.”

SMG is just one of the large physician groups that have made significant new instrument purchases, particularly for CLIA-waived rapid PCR tests, and have no plans to return to rapid antigen testing.

Training at SMG’s pediatric offices, which are slated to get eight Liats each, and urgent care centers started Dec. 4. “Once we have rolled out those sites, we will go out into the other offices. We’ll be installing about 100 Liats in multiple locations for internal medicine, family medicine, and several other service areas,” O’Connor says.

One problem she expects to avoid with the Liats is running out of reagents. “We have sequestered all of our reagents with our supplier for the entire year, and we have one lot number. Last year, we ran 15,243 flu tests, so we’ve sequestered about 16,000 tests for the coming year.”

The turnaround time of rapid PCR is a major selling point. “Obviously we were doing it in the core lab in less than a day, but it’s better if it’s done at point of care because the doctor can give a prescription or not give a prescription.”

As SMG integrates new physician groups that perform in-office antigen testing, they will be set up with Liats for immediate results. “This will be particularly helpful for pediatric practices, where they have a high volume of patients with upper respiratory and pharyngitis symptoms,” O’Connor says. Since the Liat testing has been linked to the laboratory information system and electronic health record via Roche’s IT 1000, the Liats will ease a lot of the offices’ paperwork burden, she adds.

Five-hospital Norton Healthcare in Louisville, Ky., is in the midst of an even larger change at its 32 primary care locations, 14 immediate care centers, and 21 pediatric offices, says Joshua Honaker, MD, MBA, chief medical administrative officer of Norton Medical Group. Until this season, the system had been using traditional rapid antigen tests for respiratory syncytial virus and flu as well as strep, with follow-up culture if negative. After comparisons of rapid PCR instruments, testing at pilot sites, and correlation studies, Norton Medical Group purchased 250 Liats. “Now we have rolled out Liats across the board in the last month, and we’re in the process of educating and moving our team and changing our culture to using the rapid PCR.”

Easing the shift is that the hospitals within Norton Healthcare have been doing the PCR testing for more than a year. “So they gave us really good guidance about heading in that direction as well,” Dr. Honaker says. The Food and Drug Administration’s recent reclassification of traditional rapid flu tests, mandating that they address poor sensitivity by meeting higher standards, was another factor behind Norton Medical Group’s decision to move to rapid PCR.

During the transition to rapid PCR, the rapid antigen tests are still playing a part. “We have old tests still in inventory so we will use them as needed if capacity is an issue with the rapid PCR this first flu season,” Dr. Honaker says. But this year, “We also wanted to make sure we had residual inventory for peak times. If an immediate care center that can see up to 40 patients an hour found they all came in with flu and we only had 10 instruments there to run it, they can go back and use the antigen test to help. But that is only for this year.” They will not buy more rapid antigen tests next year, he says.

Dr. Honaker

With the cost of rapid flu PCR about three to four times as much as the antigen test, and the rapid strep test about three times as much as its antigen counterpart, a move to rapid PCR does require careful analysis of reimbursement by commercial insurers and government payers, Dr. Honaker notes. But he thinks payers are recognizing the value of rapid PCR because its accuracy will reduce antibiotic prescribing. “Whether it’s a vaccine or lab test or new technology, anything that comes out is always higher cost to begin with, but I believe the price will come down as our health care systems, providers, and labs see the value and utility in it.”

Clinicians’ response has been favorable in part because of the increased clarity and confidence they have from the results they are providing. “They love to be able to look at their patients and say definitively, ‘you have this’ or ‘you don’t have it.’” Another plus: Sample volume is not an issue, as the Liat will not run a test if there is not enough sample present. “Sometimes with the antibody tests, you will question whether you have enough specimen or it was not a good swab,” Dr. Honaker says.

The rapid PCR turnaround time, about twice as long as the rapid antigen test TAT, means patients need to wait on site a little longer for a result. “But we’ll have a better answer. It ties up the room longer, but I can tell you as a clinician that all the time you spent talking about what may be happening, prepping a culture for a strep that was negative, all that time saved on the back end balances it out. So the wait is worth it.”

From a global standpoint, the business of flu testing occupies a tiny space and a flu season is a relatively insignificant event. Diagnostics is a roughly $65 billion industry; all infectious disease testing represents less than $10 billion of that, and flu testing would be a subcomponent of that, says Steve Beuchaw, executive director of Morgan Stanley and a Wall Street health care analyst for 14 years, the last five focusing almost exclusively on diagnostics.

Beuchaw would place influenza testing in the top 10 categories of respiratory and infectious disease testing that people care about, and for some companies flu is “absolutely huge,” he says. “There are companies out there that could maybe have a 10 percent growth variation from one year to the next as a function of whether we had an acute flu season, as we did last year, or a particularly mild flu season, which we hope to have this year just for our own personal well-being.” But “for a lot of diagnostics companies, flu is really not a focus at all.”

In infectious disease diagnostics, the level of competitive intensity is high, and influenza testing too is a highly competitive space, Beuchaw says. “It’s because the core detection methods—flow and PCR—are largely commodities now. In the case of Cepheid, they have a really clever bit of engineering around the PCR detector to make it exceptionally user friendly.” He believes that is why the company has a large customer base and why the research company Danaher recently opted to acquire Cepheid.

The important factor on the business side of infectious disease, he says, “is more about who has a good menu and whose test is user friendly,” which still requires engineering development and shepherding a product through regulatory agencies. “Getting each one of these tests approved costs tens of millions in the U.S. just for the FDA process.” In fact, he notes, Cepheid terminated development of an HPV test because it estimated the FDA process would cost $60 million and the company didn’t believe it would have a sufficient return on investment.

The higher quality of molecular testing over antigen testing, Beuchaw notes, has been known for a long time. Lesser known is that there are many more test alternatives out there. “To some extent influenza is single disease testing and to some extent it’s panel testing, because you might use a product that looks at a lot of different disease strains at one time.”

One diagnostics company that he follows, Qiagen, has estimated that the infectious disease testing through molecular panels is a billion-dollar business on its own, and reimbursement is pretty favorable—“a lot better than what you have seen for single target tests,” he says. “So you have a number of companies that have entered the space. The technology has made these very efficient, comprehensive panels more attractive” as a business proposition.

For purposes of business strategy, there is no real difference between an intense flu season and a more moderate season, Beuchaw says. “Companies are going to expect there will be tough flu seasons and easy flu seasons, and when they are going through product development and commercialization efforts, they take at least a five-year and probably a 10- or 20-year view, depending on what they want to accomplish with the technology.”

Worldwide, he says, infectious disease is a priority and there is an awareness of the need for high-quality detection of a number of different types of infectious disease, though flu is probably not at the top of the list because for most people it is not lethal. Test technology for infectious disease is an important focus in emerging markets, particularly in developing regions, Beuchaw notes.

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