Researchers in the Blavatnik Institute at Harvard Medical School and at Brigham and Women’s Hospital are adapting an antibody-detection tool to study the aftermath of infections by the novel coronavirus that is causing the current global pandemic.
The tool, called VirScan, detects antibodies in people’s blood that indicate active and past infections by viruses and bacteria. It was developed in 2015 by Stephen Elledge, the Gregor Mendel Professor of Genetics and of Medicine at HMS and Brigham and Women’s, and two PhD candidates in the lab, George Xu and Tomasz Kula.
Because it takes 5 to 10 days for a person to develop antibodies, Elledge emphasized that VirScan would not be used to provide real-time diagnoses of infection with SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19.
Rather, the goal is to analyze blood samples from people who recover from infection to learn about how the virus affects the immune system and the epidemiology of the disease.
Once underway, the effort will join others around the world attempting to study post-infection blood samples. The results could lead to better estimates of true infection and lethality rates by capturing cases that may have gone undetected and could inform the development of vaccines. They could also reveal new insights into the fundamentals of human immunity.
