TITLE: “Comparison of Taqman probe based Real-Time Polymerase Chain Reaction (RT-PCR) and pp65 antgenemia assay for quantitation of Human Cytomegalovirus (HCMV) clinical specimens and a study on ganciclovir resistance in HCMV” ( 5/8/7/17/2006- ECD-I )

The project commenced on 1 st September 2007 and Dr. H.N. Madhavan is the principal investigator of the project. The overall objectives of the project is To correlate the results of pp65 antigenemia assay and Real-time PCR by applying the techniques prospectively on peripheral blood specimens obtained from those immunocompromised patients and to determine novel ganciclovir resistance mutation by sequencing the UL-97 gene and UL-54 gene in patients who do not respond to the treatment with ganciclovir or valganciclovir. Till date, 38 patients have been recruited in the project which includes 19 healthy kidney donors and 19 kidney transplant patients. HCMV DNA has been detected by RT-PCR in 14 transplant patients and 5 donors. pp65 antigenemia assay was positive for 14 transplant patients and 3 donors. Ten renal transplant patients and 1 donors were positive by both RT-PCR and pp65 antigenemia assay.