Background : Molecular diagnostic methods are among major tools in management of hepatitis C virus (HCV) in infected patients. Many studies have shown that viral load is associated with stage of infection and response to treatment. Therefore, the evaluation and quantification of viral load is very important. The goal of this study is implementation of inexpensive, yet accurate method for quantitative assessment of viral load in plasma samples of infected patients.

Materials and Methods: After development and validation of the assay, quantification of HCV RNA on 200 chronic patients the start of therapy was performed using an In-House Real-time PCR assay. Measuring the concentration of viral RNA was performed using an external standard curve. It should be noted that the validation and standardization of all procedures in this study were performed using RNA standard panel. The results of this method were compared with results obtained from Artus commercial kit.

Results: Detection limit of the assay was 50 IU/ml. The mean viral load measured on a logarithmic scale (5/81± 0/22, p<0/05). Parallel analysis of samples with commercial kit showed that there is a good correlation between these two methods (R² = 0.988 p< 0.05).

Conclusion: Viral load detection of HCV was reported for the first time in Khorramabad city.  According to the results, this method has a good sensitivity and specificity for HCV quantification in large-scale. It can be a good replacement for commercial kits especially for clinical evaluation of therapy.