Antibody testing is key to understand immune response to SARS-CoV-2
While PCR testing has been used widely for COVID-19 diagnosis, it only provides information on who is currently infected. Antibody testing can tell who has been previously exposed to SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, a metric that is essential for tracking spread across a population.
It may also, as a study recently published in the journal
Nature Communications shows, hold the key to understanding the immune response to the virus.
Led by Galit Alter, PhD, Core Member of the Ragon Institute of MGH, MIT and Harvard, this study found that while antibodies against SARS-CoV-2 may be a good way to measure exposure to the virus, their presence alone wasn t enough to determine if a person had long-lasting protection. I