Hyderabad: As the world has crossed over one million coronavirus cases on Friday, the race to develop and approve a test with a different purpose to assess not current viral infection, but immunity to severe acute respiratory syndrome COVID-19 has heated up.
According to the reports, medical diagnostic companies are scrambling, and governments across the globe are looking to order these antibody tests by the millions.
In Europe, a German company called Euroimmun has recently received certification that will allow their test to be sold within the EU. “Everybody is getting crazy at the moment with regard to antibody detection, especially for medical personnel, because it’s very important to know if they already had the virus”, says Konstanze Stiba, Euroimmun’s antibody test product manager.
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He further said that health worker shortages due to illness put further pressure on already strained health systems. If a test can show that a health worker has already had COVID-19, and is therefore probably immune, they can return to work without fear of infection.
Research states that antibody testing is multipurpose: it can verify that vaccines are working as intended during clinical trials, or be used in contact tracing weeks or longer after a suspected infection in an individual. Probably its most important current use, en masse, is to help inform public policymakers how many asymptomatic cases have occurred in a population.
PCR tests detecting viral RNA, indicating current viral infection, are being used to diagnose cases of COVID-19 and are an essential part of contact tracing and testing.
However, there are global supply challenges, with huge demand for the PCR primers, as well as for the positive controls needed to ensure the performance of individual machines.
