Researchers Focus On Testing Antibodies To Battle COVID-19

Mount Sinai researchers turned their focus to developing tests using antibodies to respond to the growing cases of COVID-19.

The researchers at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai worked to determine a method to detect virus-fighting antibodies from the blood of coronavirus survivors and are already in the process of determining how quickly people develop antibodies to COVID-19, the New York Post reported.

The importance of using antibodies in testing were highly detailed in the Mount Sinai.org website where they enumerated the three major significance in testing a COVID-19 survivor's antibodies.

First, it provides an accurate picture of the number of people infected; second, it determines the people who have developed an immunity against the virus and therefore could care for COVID-19 patients with minimal to zero risks; and lastly, it would identify newly-recovered patients with high levels of the virus-fighting antibodies and could potentially donate their antibody-rich plasma to patients with severe COVID-19 in an effort to stimulate and strengthen the patients' immune systems to battle the virus.

According to New York Governor Andrew Cuomo, state officials were testing the procedure where the plasma of a COVID-19 survivor was taken, processed and the antibodies were injected into a patient.

The study has been posted on the preprint server medRxiv, and although it's yet too early to use the test on patients because it has not yet been published in a peer-reviewed journal, the Food and Drug Administration has approved the trial which will begin this week on a "compassionate care basis".

Mount Sinai school virologist Florian Krammer said that labs could scale the test to "screen a few thousand people a day" for antibodies.

However, at this time, Mount Sinai follows the New York state guidelines where they test only those who have trouble breathing and/or moderate to severe respiratory symptoms.