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Some interesting dialogue...Stanford's Benjamin Pinsky

[FactFinder1994]

He values the data from Antibody tests, and views them as a valuable assessment tool.  

Verghese: You've done a lot of studies on antibodies, antibody responses, and types of antibodies in nature, both in individuals and community surveys. Can you summarize the state of the art in terms of understanding the antibody response to COVID and testing for it? Is it meaningful to test?

 

Pinsky: A number of professional societies have come out with statements saying that serologic testing for SARS-CoV-2 is only useful in very specific circumstances. Some — the Infectious Diseases Society of America, and others — don't recommend it in most cases. As I mentioned, we use serologic testing a lot here, because we have such a large immunocompromised population, mostly transplant, and we're trying to understand whether and how those individuals are responding to vaccination, making a sort of risk assessment for how they're going to behave as society opens up again. So, a lot of our testing is on those immunocompromised individuals, to learn how they're responding to vaccination.

We recently switched to a new assay, a quantitative serologic assay that looks at multiple different targets. It has a full-length spike receptor–binding domain, which will identify people with natural infection as well as those individuals who were vaccinated with a spike-based vaccine. It also has nucleocapsid so we can distinguish between natural infection and vaccination. That's been quite interesting and helpful, in addition to having the quantitative aspect. This test was used in a number of the clinical trials for vaccine approval. So, we have at least some correlative protection. Of course, the 95% CI starts at 1.0 and goes to almost the end of the race. But at least we have the median values to give some idea of whether someone's responding as we would expect for vaccination.

Verghese: Are these standardized across labs?

Pinsky: These are standardized assays, using the WHO International Standard unit — binding antibody units per mL, so one can calibrate this assay to other assays that are reporting quantitatively. This will enable us to start to gather more data about the quantitative response and how this correlates to protection.

MedscapeAnimal Reservoirs, Immunocompromised Hosts: COVID ...His focus of interest is molecular infectious disease testing, ... terms of understanding the antibody response to COVID and testing for it?.32 mins ago