Dear colleague,

The EC4 Strategic Plan 2002-2005 comprises actions relating to coordination of automatic recognition on the basis of equivalence of standards (CARE) at three levels:

• CARE for laboratory specialists
• CARE for laboratories
• CARE for laboratory data

(Please visit the www.ec-4.org web site for more information about EC4 structure and activities).

The EQUAL Project

The developments in large projects as the Human Genome Project as well as the developments of diagnostic DNA technology have led and lead to a huge potential of investigations and assays now available also for routine laboratories. Although the development of routine methodology is fast, external quality assessment of PCR assays is still in its infancy.

For this reason EC4 has started and endorses the EQUAL project. This project is based on three different programmes on External Quality Assessment in Molecular Methods that are independent of the analyte. The design of these three programmes allows participating laboratories to have an indication of the error cause (problem related design survey) which is obtained by including in the survey samples testing some critical steps in the analysis (i.e. the amplification phase, presence of possible contamination, DNA extraction efficiency/quantification from a sample etcetera).

Three EQUAL Programmes

The three different EQA schemes proposed are:

• EQUAL-qual for monitoring of performance of qualitative PCR based assays
• EQUAL-quant for monitoring performance of the 5'-nuclease quantitative PCR based assay
• EQUAL-seq for monitoring sequencing based assays

The EQUAL Project includes also the organization of Six training courses in various European Countries for revision of technical and interpretation skills required for the correct use of the molecular diagnostic tests.

The importance of the EQUAL project has been recognized by the European Union Commission and is supported by the Commission under the Sixth EU Framework Programme for Research and Technological Development. You can find more details about the aims and structure of the EQUAL Project in the next web pages.

Kind regards,