UC San Diego

While human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) infection has become a treatable disease with the development of combination antiretroviral therapy (cART), chronic inflammation that affects the central nervous system and other organs is still common. Reliable methods are needed to study HIV-associated inflammatory biomarkers. In this study involving both plasma and cerebrospinal fluid (CSF), we compared multiplex bead array (MBA) to a relatively new technology based on microfluidics and glass nanoreactor (GNR) technology for the measurement of three commonly studied markers from HIV-infected individuals. We found that results correlated between the two platforms for MCP-1 in both fluids as well as for plasma TNFα (all p < .005). However, results between the two platforms did not correlate for CSF TNFα or fractalkine from plasma or CSF. A statistically significant decrease in CSF TNFα over time (p < .0001) was only detectable with the MBA platform, and TNFα on the MBA was the only CSF biomarker to correlate with CSF HIV RNA (rho = 0.71, p < .0001). Meanwhile, the GNR platform was superior in terms of intra-assay fractalkine (FKN) variability and the detection of a significant FKN decrease over time. Additionally, the only significant correlation between blood biomarkers and plasma HIV RNA was with FKN on the GNR platform (rho = 0.38, p = .015). Given the variability in results between platforms, more research is needed on methods to quantitate HIV-associated inflammation.