Even if you’ve gained some immunity to covid-19 by getting vaccinated or recovering from the disease, it’s hard to know how vulnerable you might still be. Now MIT researchers have developed an easy-to-use test that may reveal just that. Using the “lateral flow” technology familiar from home covid and pregnancy tests, it measures the level of neutralizing antibodies against the SARS-CoV-2 virus in a tiny blood sample collected from a finger prick.
Easy access to this kind of test could help people determine what kind of precautions they should take, such as getting an additional booster. “Among the general population, many people probably want to know how well protected they are,” says Hojun Li, a physician and a lab head at MIT’s Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research, the senior author of a paper on the technique. “But I think where this test might make the biggest difference is for anybody who is receiving chemotherapy, anybody who’s on immunosuppressive drugs for rheumatologic disorders or autoimmune diseases, and anybody who’s elderly or doesn’t mount good immune responses in general.”
Li normally studies blood cell development and how blood cells become cancerous, not infectious diseases or diagnostics. So to develop this test, he sought advice from MIT faculty members Hadley Sikes and Sangeeta Bhatia, SM ’93, PhD ’97, who have expertise in the technology. With their help, his lab developed a device that can measure the amount of antibodies that block the SARS-CoV-2 receptor binding domain (RBD) from binding to ACE2, the human receptor the virus uses to infect cells.
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