This COVID-19 antibody test can predict if you will get a serious illness

University of California, Irvine — Researchers at the University of California, Irvine Developed a new type of COVID-19 antibody test It can predict early whether someone has a serious case of illness.

A two-step test works by searching the patient’s blood for what scientists call “bad antibodies” that are produced early in the infection. Next, patients are evaluated for risk factors such as age, gender, and pre-existing condition.

If bad antibodies are present in patients with three or more risk factors, the test can predict whether a person is on the path to hospitalization with an accuracy of 96.7%. mSphere..

According to Gregory Weiss, a professor at the University of California, Irvine, who oversaw the study, a simple blood test available in laboratories around the world shows that within the first few days of illness, potentially one day after symptoms appear. Later you can reveal the bad antibody.

According to Sanjana Sen, a graduate student at the University of California, Irvine, the test may help doctors quickly identify patients for targeted treatment. Sen led the study with PhD candidates Emily Sanders and Christine Gabriel.

“What we really wanted was to be able to see the patient, diagnose it almost instantly, and triage it in a particular way,” says Sen.

Early in the pandemic, when Sen came up with the idea, Weiss ordered the students to develop a conventional antibody test for COVID-19. Want to develop a test that will help you not only identify the virus, but also predict who will have bad results?

The team began looking for patterns in the records of 86 patients, and they found that a significant proportion of people who really got sick had one particular antibody: a virus called Epitope 9. Antibodies that adhere to a part of.

Antibodies are viruses-fighting molecules that are often discussed in the vaccine context. A good antibody binds to the pointed protrusions on the surface of the coronavirus known as peplomer.

“Spike antibodies physically block the coronavirus from entering cells,” says Sanders.

Occasionally, when a patient has many infections, the virus particles can fall apart, exposing the inner features of their shell. Some people begin to make antibodies that are shaped to their internal characteristics.

The end result, as Gabriel explained, is that their immune system spends a lot of time and energy making essentially useless antibodies.

“It’s like your immune system is holding the steering wheel of a car, and it makes a bad, wrong turn in the early stages of the disease,” Wyeth said. “It’s very difficult to come back after that.”

Studies show that the presence of only bad antibodies, without risk factor scores, can predict serious illness with an accuracy of 83.6 percent.

However, taking risk factors into account makes the test even more sensitive. These risk factors include being over 50 years old and having symptoms such as high blood pressure, obesity, diabetes, kidney disease, lung disease, cerebrovascular disease, and cancer. Men are at higher risk than women.

Researchers find that people with three or more of these risk factors, such as men over the age of 50 with high blood pressure, are about 14 times more likely to have serious illness if bad antibodies are detected. it was done.

Researchers emphasize that testing for antibodies as negative is not a health bill. Only about a quarter of patients who developed severe illness in this study had bad antibodies. This indicates that human health can deteriorate for many reasons unrelated to this immune phenomenon.

But within a subset of people with this bad antibody, researchers hope that this predictive test can help people get better treatment faster. And what’s the best part?

“You can pick it up wherever people are doing traditional blood tests for viral antibodies,” Gabriel said.

Labs around the world already have the equipment needed to reproduce this test. The University of California, Irvine team has decided not to patent the technology, so anyone can start testing these bad antibodies today.

“What our scientists can do is nothing more important than introducing cheap technology into areas that can make a difference in people’s lives,” Weiss said.

And that may be the case. Weiss said the test had already been discussed with the World Health Organization.

This story was originally published by Derekstal at Scripps Station KGTV In San Diego.