![]() There are two types of antibody test one can aim for. Research laboratories and pharmaceutical companies are racing to produce antibody tests that can detect COVID-19 infection with sufficient specificity and sensitivity 6. Such a test is needed for retrospective contact tracing, investigation of the asymptomatic infection rate, accurate determination of the case fatality rate, and assessment of herd immunity and humoral protective immunity in recovered patients and recipients of vaccine candidates, and in the search for the natural reservoir and intermediate host(s) 6. The causative agent was identified as 2019-nCoV, subsequently designated SARS-CoV-2 3, 4, which belongs to the species SARS-related coronavirus (SARSr-CoV), the same as for SARS-CoV, the causative agent of the SARS outbreak 17 years ago 5.Īlthough molecular detection techniques, such as the polymerase chain reaction (PCR) and next-generation sequencing, have played an important role in acute diagnosis and monitoring of genetic changes of the virus, an urgent need exists for a reliable and versatile serological or antibody test. The COVID-19 outbreak was first recognized in December 2019 in Wuhan, China 1 and has since spread to all parts of the world, resulting in a total of 10,357,662 confirmed infections with 508,055 deaths as of 1 July 2020 2. The surrogate virus neutralization test does not require biosafety level 3 containment, making it broadly accessible to the wider community for both research and clinical applications. The test, which has been validated with two cohorts of patients with COVID-19 in two different countries, achieves 99.93% specificity and 95–100% sensitivity, and differentiates antibody responses to several human coronaviruses. Our simple and rapid test is based on antibody-mediated blockage of the interaction between the angiotensin-converting enzyme 2 (ACE2) receptor protein and the receptor-binding domain. Here, we report a SARS-CoV-2 surrogate virus neutralization test that detects total immunodominant neutralizing antibodies targeting the viral spike (S) protein receptor-binding domain in an isotype- and species-independent manner. The current gold standard is the conventional virus neutralization test requiring live pathogen and a biosafety level 3 laboratory. ![]() A robust serological test to detect neutralizing antibodies to SARS-CoV-2 is urgently needed to determine not only the infection rate, herd immunity and predicted humoral protection, but also vaccine efficacy during clinical trials and after large-scale vaccination. ![]()
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