Great News for Parents as New Blood Test Could Indicate How Immune a Person is to COVID

There is some great news for parents as, according to a new study, a newly developed blood test that measures a specific immune response in the body could help doctors gauge how much protection a person has against COVID-19.

The blood test, which focuses on the part of the immune system that affords long-term protection by prompting the body to remember the coronavirus, could help make sense of the complex tangle of COVID immunity that now exists from person to person, according to NBC News.

The blood test can, for instance, measure COVID immunity regardless of whether someone has developed a level of protection from vaccinations and booster shots or from one or more natural infections.

Researchers look to gain approval for blood test

Ernesto Guccione, an associate professor of oncological sciences and pharmacological sciences at the Tisch Cancer Institute at Mount Sinai, said that others, who may have much lower levels of protection because they are immunocompromised, could also use the test to assess their vulnerability and see how they responded to the COVID vaccines.

Guccione, one of the authors of the study published in the journal Nature Biotechnology on Monday, June 13, said ideally, it will give a complete picture of where a person stands and a comprehensive picture of their immune protection.

The researchers said their next focus is on clinical trials to gain approval from the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and the European Medicines Agency (EMA). The blood test involves taking a small blood sample at a clinic and mixing it with snippets of proteins from the coronavirus. Researchers then check if the so-called T cells are activated in the sample taken.

T cells are the cornerstone of the immune system's long-term memory and typically lie in wait until they detect the presence of foreign invaders. T cells can recall a virus years and sometimes decades later, unlike antibody levels, which can wane following infections or vaccinations.

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T cells hold the key to preventing severe illness from COVID

T cells are primed to recall fragments of a virus, including from variants that can dodge protective antibodies, whether through infections or vaccinations, according to Time Magazine. That means T cells won't stop an infection from happening, but they can prevent a patient from suffering a severe illness because of COVID.

Previous studies also have found that T cells can recognize all the known COVID variants of concern, including omicron, but Guccione said it is still an active area of research. Scientists are continuing to refine the blood test and studying how well T cells respond against different variants of concern.

Guccione added that the data coming out so far are very encouraging, and the good news is that they develop immunity against multiple proteins from the virus. Many of them do not tend to be mutated by the variants.

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