a european multicientre study on the comparison of hbv viral loads between veris hbv assay and roche cobas background hepatitis b viral load testing is essential to treatment and monitoring decisions in patients with chronic hepatitis b beckman coulter has developed the veris hbv assay veris for use on the fully automated dxn veris molecular diagnostics system1 objectives to evaluate the clinical performance of the veris hbv assay at multiple eu laboratories study design method comparison was performed with a total of 344 plasma specimens from hbv infected patients tested with veris and cobas taqman hbv test cobas 207 specimens tested with veris and realtime hbv assay realtime 86 specimens tested with veris and versant hbv assay versant and 74 specimens tested with veris and artus hbv rg pcr kit artusresults blandaltman analysis showed average bias of 046 log10 iuml between veris and cobas 046 log10iuml between veris and realtime 036 log10iuml between veris and versant and 012 log10iuml between veris and artus bias was consistent across the assay range patient monitoring results using veris demonstrated similar viral load trends over time to cobas realtime and artusconclusions the veris hbv assay demonstrated comparable clinical performance with varying degrees of negative bias compared to other currently marketed assays for hbv dna monitoring this negative bias should be taken into consideration if switching monitoring methods to veris