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Ben Labrot

Jun 30, 2026

4:14
Why are you both so interested in this specific laboratory phenomenon, the viral blip? Why is it important or perhaps why is it more important to explain it to the patient than it is as perhaps a clinical finding?
4:34
So the reason this sort of came to top of mind for me this year was in my role as Roche's medical affairs kind of global lead for molecular HIV diagnostics, I often get pulled into calls with customers who are having difficulty or having questions about the use of kind of our assays in their lab.
4:54
And I felt like this calendar year, I participated in more support calls for laboratories that were concerned about increasing frequency of blips in their results than I have been in the rest of my five years at Roche, just this calendar year.
5:11
I'm not really sure why it seems to have spiraled up so much, but the pattern is always the same.
5:17
The labs, so we've seen an increase in the kind of detectable versus non-detectable patients.
5:23
We're wondering if there's a problem with the instrument.
5:28
It's almost always related to like pre-analytics or some other factor in the lab.

15 MINS LATER

20:28
And you're going to see this number and then ask yourself, boy, in the last week, have I had a sore throat? Have I had a runny nose? Have I fought anything off? Probably can come up with the explanation yourself right there.

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