Basic Biologists Take on SARS-CoV-2: Part 3

In the final episode of our COVID-19 mini-series, B3 hosts Joe and Robyn discuss an exciting paper looking at SARS-CoV-2 Antibody Testing. They are joined by UCSF scientists Cody Mowery and Professor Jeff Wittman, and our fabulous non-scientist guests Jacqueline Fabius and Lauren Weiser. This paper took a good look at the performance of some of the first antibody tests to come on the market, and in this episode we discuss what these findings are and what they mean for the public. All of the findings we talk about today can be found on the COVID-19 Testing Project webpage here: https://covidtestingproject.org/ and in the recently published peer-reviewed manuscript in Nature Biotechnology titled “Evaluation of SARS-CoV-2 Serology Assays Reveals a Range of Test Performance”. Additional publicly available resources or articles discussed in the episode: Apoorva Mandavilli’s article in the New York Times covering the Nature Biotechnology paper: “Coronavirus Antibody Testing: Can you Trust the Results?” Ed Young’s article in the Atlantic on Immunology: “Immunology is Where Intuition Goes to Die” The FDA’s List of Emergency Use Authorization for Diagnostic and Serology Testing: https://www.fda.gov/medical-devices/coronavirus-disease-2019-covid-19-emergency-use-authorizations-medical-devices/vitro-diagnostics-euas#individual-serologic Note that the science on COVID-19 is ongoing and guidelines do change. For the most up-to-date IDSA guidelines for serology testing, please see this website: https://www.idsociety.org/practice-guideline/covid-19-guideline-serology/. For a truly excellent quick demonstration of False Positive/Negative as applied to antibody tests, please check out Mona Chalabi’s visual explainer on instagram And if you are interested, check out back in April: House Oversight Committee seeks changes to FDA serology test policy If you have any questions or comments you can email us at biologistsbeingbasic@gmail.com or find us on twitter or instagram (@biosbeingbasic).