A team of researchers from Mount Sinai hospital in New York has developed a test that measures our immunity to SARS-CoV-2, the coronavirus that causes covid. This is a blood test whose results are available in just 24 hours and which will allow us to monitor the immunity of the general population and the effectiveness of current vaccines. The results of the study were published in Nature Biotechnology.
Serological tests can be of type qualitativei.e. detect only the presence of antibodies, or quantitythat is, indicate how many antibodies we have developed.
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Different from serologicals. The only way we had to date to know if we had developed an immune response (even partial) to the covid was to carry out a serological test: the problem, however, is that this type of test looks exclusively at antibodies, and a positive test or negative says little about our actual protection.
The new test developed by the US team, on the other hand, measures the presence of T cells which, together with antibodies, trigger the immune response against the coronavirus, protecting us above all from the most serious forms of covid. Because it’s important? “Sometimes the most vulnerable people do not develop antibodies”, explains Ernesto Guccione, one of the researchers involved in the study: “for this reason, measuring the activation of T cells, which are also more effective against new variants, is essential to understand real immunity. of a person.”
T cells, or T lymphocytes, are the heart of adaptive (or acquired) immunity, which is more effective than innate immunity because it changes to adapt to fight the different pathogens. The name “T” is due to the fact that these cells mature in the thymus, a gland found in the chest.
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After studying different types of PCR tests, the researchers focused in particular on two: qTACT, in which RNA is extracted from the blood sample to analyze it and search for T cells; and the dqTACT, in which the blood sample is directly analyzed. Of the two, the faster, more accurate, cheaper and easier to use is the dqTACT, which has recently received the European CE certification for medical-diagnostic devices. in vitro, and is now awaiting clinical approval from the FDA (USA) and EMA (Europe). The use of these tests on a large scale could serve in the future to monitor the immunization levels of the general population, and to evaluate different strategies for (re) vaccination of the most vulnerable people.