A scientist at the Seattle Children’s Research Institute says a cell-free test devised by him can assess effectiveness of Covid-19 bodies overnight as compared with other tests that can take up to three days.
In the study published in The Journal of Infectious Diseases, Stephen Smith, a doctor at the Institute said: “Other tests that provide insight into immunity work by taking antibodies from your blood and mixing them together with a virus and then exposing that mixture to live cells. Three days later they can determine immunity based on whether your blood prevented the viruses from infecting the cells or not.”
“Our cell-free test can provide that same information overnight,” he added.
Smith carried out a study to find a reliable way to quantify whether an individual has neutralising antibodies that could prevent the novel coronavirus from infecting cells.
Smith said in his study: “If you think you’ve had Covid-19 and go to the doctor, they can test your blood and tell you whether or not you have antibodies to Covid-19, but that doesn’t tell you whether your antibodies are any good at functionally blocking the virus from binding to cells.”
Range of applications
“There are tests on the market now that can tell you that, but they are expensive and take a long time to get results. We wanted to develop a way to give you additional information about your immune status without all the barriers that make it difficult to use in a community setting,” he added.
Smith claimed that his newly developed diagnostic could have a range of potential commercial applications. From broad community testing to assessing vaccine responses and screening for convalescent plasmas that have particularly high levels of neutralising antibodies as a potential treatment.
For the study, Smith applied a technique called immunoprecipitation detected by flow cytometry (IP-FCM) to study the interactions between the proteins and to look for evidence that antibodies were inhibiting the interaction and blocking the virus from binding to cells.
Immunoprecipitation (IP) is the technique of solidifying a protein antigen out of solution using an antibody that specifically binds to that particular protein.
Cell-free method
Instead of relying on live cells and viruses like other available blood tests, IP-FCM uses recombinant - or lab-made - proteins and instruments commonly available in commercial serological labs.
Using IP-FCM, Smith tested the blood samples from 24 cohort participants. The test showed that 92 per cent of the participants had antibodies to the novel coronavirus at an average of a little over a month post-infection. Results were validated with 30 control samples.
The research team also intends to retest the samples to see how antibody levels change over time.
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