Medicion de los anticuerpos contra el virus de la inmunodeficiencia humana: estudio internacional en colaboración para evaluar los sueros de referencia de la OMS

Two preparations of human sera, one reactive against human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) and the other unreactive, were evaluated as potential international reference reagents (IRR) in an international collaborative study. Twenty-one laboratories participated and tested these and five other human sera which were found to range from highly reactive to unreactive. The proposed "positive" IRR was found to react strongly in all immunoassays and gave all the expected bands in immunoblot systems using HTLV-III, LAV-I or similar virus strains as antigens. The "unreactive" serum was judged to be negative by ELISA and immunoblots. The end-points determined by ELISAs varied considerably between laboratories, even between those using the same commercial kit. This variation was reduced somewhat when the reactivities of the samples were expressed relative to the proposed IRR