Anand Shunmugavel and Kaitlyn Sadtler work on the NIH’s new coronavirus serologic survey.
NIBIB
As the COVID-19 coronavirus pandemic began to take root in the U.S., Kaitlyn Sadtler knew she wanted to figure out a way to help. The 30 year old immunologist, a Forbes 30 Under 30 alumni, is the chief of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) Section on Immunoengineering where she normally conducts research on how the immune system interacts with tissue growth. Now, she’s leading the country’s largest effort to find previously unknown cases of coronavirus.
“What we’re looking at here is kind of trying to detect the undetected,” she says.
The goal of this NIH study, which was announced on April 10th, is to find out how many adults in the U.S. without confirmed cases of COVID-19 have antibodies to the virus. This would give public health officials a better idea of how and where the disease has spread, which can help with mitigation efforts and provide a better idea of when social distancing measures can be relaxed.
“There’s a lot of cases of coronavirus that are pretty mild; people might have the sniffles, people might have potentially no symptoms at all,” Sadtler says. This research will help scientists figure out how far the infection has spread in our country, and how many people might already have immunity to the virus.
Previous research has shown that almost 20% of COVID-19 infections are asymptomatic, meaning people don’t experience the fever or cough that is a common hallmark of the illness. These people can still spread the coronavirus though, and the majority of new coronavirus infections are spread by people who don’t even know they have the disease. But it’s crucial to know exactly how many people in a population have antibodies to the virus, Sadtler says. If a second wave of the disease occurs, knowing how many people might already be immune can help experts predict what the outbreak will look like and inform policy decisions.
Antibody tests are already being promoted as a way to figure out when the American economy can reopen. Last week, National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases director Anthony Fauci said that the federal government was discussing the possibility of “immunity cards,” which would be certificates given out to people with antibodies who could return to work. Similar cards are also being considered in other countries, including Chile and Italy.
There’s one hitch though— we still don’t understand a lot about immunity to COVID-19, including how long people with antibodies are protected from getting the disease again. Some countries, including China and South Korea, are already seeing previously recovered people test positive for the virus again, though it isn’t known if these are true positives or due to faulty testing. That’s another part of the NIH study’s research, says Sadtler. “It sounds like there is some level of protection,” she says of coronavirus antibodies, but “the extent to which is still unsure.” By studying people who have immune cells targeted against the coronavirus, they hope to get more insight about how long immunity lasts.
There are two ways that people can participate in the NIH study: either go in person for a blood draw at its lab in Maryland, or fill out a form and get a finger-prick kit sent directly to your door. People from all over the country can participate, Sadtler says, and the more participants they get, the better. There’s already been a lot of interest; more than 100 people have already gotten their blood drawn in person, and Sadtler says over 200,000 people have responded to an email asking for participants. Their current goal is to test 10,000 people from around the U.S., she says. While they want to eventually provide people with test results, diagnostics isn’t the main goal of the study.
Sadtler says that she predicts they will find many more people who have antibodies to the virus than those who have already been tested for it. Hopefully, their work can help us better understand the immune response to COVID-19, and figure out how many people in our society will be protected from the next outbreak. “Our goal is to slow the spread, flatten the curve as everyone’s heard, and get our way to that vaccine,” she says.
