Developing COVID-19 Diagnostics by Understanding Antibody Protection
In This Video
- Galit Alter, PhD, is a principal investigator at the Ragon Institute of Massachusetts General Hospital, MIT and Harvard, and Samana Cay MGH Research Scholar
- Early on in the COVID-19 pandemic, her research looked at early responses to SARS-CoV-2 infection at hospital admission to see whether or not they could predict if someone was going to handle the disease well and survive
- This research has allowed for the development of diagnostic platforms that can help in managing patient care, helping to inform which patients may require closer attention or more intense medical interventions
Galit Alter, PhD, principal investigator at the Ragon Institute of Massachusetts General Hospital, MIT and Harvard, and Samana Cay MGH Research Scholar. Early on in the COVID-19 pandemic, her research looked at early responses to SARS-CoV-2 infection at hospital admission to see whether or not they could predict if someone was going to handle the disease well and survive. This research has allowed for the development of diagnostic platforms that can help in managing patient care, helping to inform which patients may require closer attention or more intense medical interventions.
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Transcript
Dating back to March we became very interested in understanding how antibodies provide protection against SARS-CoV-2. The dogma in the field was that antibodies that block infection were essential in providing protection following natural acquisition of the virus, but it turned out that as people looked deeper at the humoral immune responses, they noticed that, in fact, elderly populations as well as individuals who were sickest after infection, had the highest levels of these neutralizing antibodies that are thought to be essential in blocking infection.
So this is really where we stepped in and began to think, well maybe antibodies are doing something different to provide protection following infection. And this is where we began to deploy our tools, adapt the platform to begin to look at all the different things that antibodies could do to fight the virus across populations of individuals.
Early on, we looked at very early responses to SARS-CoV-2 infection looking at people time of hospital admission to see whether or not we could predict if someone was going to handle the disease well and survive, versus individuals who were going to go on and unfortunately not deal with the disease very well. We found there were significant differences in the functions of antibodies that were able to drive this control. And these functions had nothing to do with just blocking the virus, but instead, in recruiting the immune system to essentially gobble up virus anywhere in the lungs, to essentially clear it from the lung compartment.
From a clinical care perspective what we have begun to identify are pathogen-specific, or SARS-CoV-2 biomarkers, that can essentially immediately triage individuals into different classes of potential outcomes. What that means is that there are some individuals that very early on make antibodies that can essentially predict that they are not going to deal with the virus very effectively. This has allowed us to develop diagnostic platforms that can help in managing patient care, helping to inform which patients may require closer attention or more intense medical interventions.
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