A robotics platform is being employed to aid development of a blood test that can identify who is immune to COVID-19 on a mass scale.
Located at Sinai Health’s Lunenfeld-Tanenbaum Research Institute in Toronto, Canada, the platform means the new test has the potential to allow hospitals and other institutions to screen up to 10,000 samples at once.
The test is being developed by a team of researchers at Sinai Health and the University of Toronto
It works by detecting antibodies in the immune system of infected patients.
According to Dr Anne-Claude Gingras, project co-lead, those antibodies persist in blood even after the virus has been completely eliminated.
“This test is being developed with the goal of monitoring the percentage of the population that has been infected and to help in identifying those individuals that may have protective immunity,” said Gingras.
The blood-based tests being developed by the research team do not directly detect the live virus and are not intended to replace current tests for infection.
The test is currently in the early research phase and not in use clinically, but the team hopes to progress to testing volunteers within the next two weeks.
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