The extended recovery ring-stage survival assay is a scalable alternative for artemisinin susceptibility phenotyping of fresh Plasmodium falciparum isolates

Artemisinin partial resistance (ART-R) has emerged in eastern Africa, necessitating regular surveillance of susceptibility of Plasmodium falciparum to artemisinins. The microscopy-based ring-stage survival assay (RSA) provides a laboratory correlate of ART-R but is limited by low throughput and subjectivity of microscopic counts of viable parasites. The extended recovery ring-stage survival assay (eRRSA) replaces microscopy with efficient quantitative PCR (qPCR) readouts but has been studied only with culture-adapted P. falciparum clones. We measured susceptibility to dihydroartemisinin (DHA) after a 6-h incubation with 700-nM DHA, followed by culture without drug, by comparing survival with that of untreated controls by microscopy (the RSA) or qPCR (the eRRSA) and also performed standard growth inhibition (half-maximal inhibitory concentration [IC₅₀]) assays for 122 P. falciparum isolates freshly collected in eastern and northern Uganda from March to July 2022. The median values for RSA survival, eRRSA fold change, and DHA IC₅₀ were 3.0%, 46.2, and 3.2 nM, respectively. RSA percent survival and eRRSA fold changes correlated strongly (Spearman correlation coefficient [r_s] = −0.7411, P < 0.0001), with modest associations between the presence of validated P. falciparum Kelch13 ART-R mutations (C469Y or A675V) and RSA (median survival 2.6% for wild type [WT] vs 4.1% for mutant, P = 0.01), or eRRSA (median fold change 63.4 for WT vs 30.9 for mutant, P = 0.003) results. Significant correlations were also observed between DHA IC₅₀ values and both RSA percent survival (r_s = 0.4235, P < 0.0001) and eRRSA fold changes (r_s = −0.4116, P < 0.0001). The eRRSA is a scalable alternative for phenotyping fresh P. falciparum isolates, providing similar results with improved throughput.