School of Medicine Publications
Document Type
Article
Publication Date
2026
Abstract
Background: With >10 million new tuberculosis (TB) cases/year, a limitation to TB control is the lack of simple and accurate tests for TB diagnosis and drug-susceptibility testing (DST) in endemic regions. We evaluated the accuracy of the first-generation, low-complexity phenotypic TB test (1G test), designed for simultaneous Mtb detection and resistance to isoniazid, rifampicin and moxifloxacin, suitable for resource-limited settings.
Methods: A cross-sectional study was conducted using sputa from 426 possible pulmonary TB subjects from two small Mexican cities bordering Texas. The 1G test was compared against phenotypic TB detection tests in the region [acid fast bacilli smear microscopy and Mycobacteria Growth Indicator Tube (MGIT) culture], and to MGIT-DST for resistance to isoniazid, rifampicin and moxifloxacin.
Findings: The 1G test demonstrated ≥98% sensitivity for Mtb detection, 100% sensitivity and 91% (rifampicin), 94% (isoniazid) and 97% (moxifloxacin) specificity for DST, and less contamination than the MGIT (3.5% vs. 8.1%; p< 0.05). The 1G test time to detection (TTD) of Mtb and simultaneous DST was 17-days, while the MGIT-DST required two steps: 7 days for Mtb detection plus 14 more (total 21 days) for DST. Our study site DR-TB prevalence was 14% when testing all consecutively-enrolled participants vs. 6% by passive reporting.
Interpretation: The 1G test is a low-complexity phenotypic TB diagnostic method that is a practical replacement to current culture-based tests. Future studies are warranted to evaluate the implementation of the 1G test in decentralized clinics that lack molecular tools, resources and expertise.
Recommended Citation
Aguirre, M., Ayala, D., Garcia, J. I., Martinez-Lopez, Y. E., Hicks, A. D., Chacon, N., Gay-Cobb, A., Schami, A., Zavala-Perez, S., Dominguez-Trejo, I. A., Cruz-Gonzalez, A. M., Loera-Salazar, R., Rodríguez-Herrera, J. E., Garcia-Oropesa, E. M., Lee, M., Rendón, A., Wang, S. H., Yotebieng, M., Evans, C. A., Torrelles, J. B., … Restrepo, B. I. (2025). Accuracy of the phenotypic 1G test to detect Mycobacterium tuberculosis and drug resistance from sputa in the US-Mexico border. The Journal of infectious diseases, jiaf638. Advance online publication. https://doi.org/10.1093/infdis/jiaf638
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
Publication Title
The Journal of infectious diseases
DOI
10.1093/infdis/jiaf638
Academic Level
faculty
Mentor/PI Department
Office of Human Genetics
Comments
© The Author(s) 2025. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of Infectious Diseases Society of America. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted reuse, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. https://doi.org/10.1093/infdis/jiaf638