Servoss Gives Update on Covid Antibodies Test Kit

Sarah Brown: Hello, welcome to Short Talks From the Hill, a podcast at the University of Arkansas. My name is Sarah Brown. I’m a communications coordinator here at the university. Today I’ll be talking with Dr. Shannon Servoss, an associate professor of chemical engineering and the co-director of the Office of Undergraduate Research. If you’ll recall, Dr. Servoss joined us a few months ago on the podcast to discuss her work with Now Diagnostics. She spent a year working with the local company to develop a rapid test kit that detects coronavirus antibodies. Today, she joins us to give us an update on the status of their emergency use authorization from the FDA. Hello Shannon, welcome to the podcast.

Shannon Servoss: Thanks for having me back. On Wednesday, May 26, Now Diagnostics announced that they received emergency use authorization for the Adexis DX Covid antibody test.

SB: Wow, that is wonderful news. Did you know it’s possible that you are the first U of A researcher to secure an EUA?

SS: I did not. That’s pretty cool. I mean, I haven’t secured the EUA, but I was part of the process of developing the device that got the UA, so that’s pretty awesome.

Shannon Servoss

SB: So how do you feel about that? Not many U of A researchers have worked on a project that received an EUA before.

SS: I think it’s pretty amazing and I think it’s a great example… You know, in this case I was I was working with the company at the time, so I was actually working on their technology. But I do think there are a lot of opportunities for researchers on campus to collaborate with companies to develop tests in a rapid manner so that we can get them out for studies. And I think, you know, really moving a little bit away from this one, vaccines are a great example of where that has happened.

SB: Yeah, that’s a great segue to my next question. Now that 50% of adults in the U.S. have been vaccinated, as of late May 2021, who would benefit the most from this rapid antibody test kit?

SS: That’s a great question and a bit of a loaded question. There’s been a lot of talk around this recently, and who wants… who should and who would want to get an antibodies test. And so I would say on the want side, I think everybody would like to know if they have antibodies, right? Right, but there has to be a little caution taken with that as well. So I would not say that everybody should run out and get an antibody test as soon as possible. I don’t think that’s the best idea for any of us, because these antibody tests, none of them including this one, were developed to test for the antibodies that vaccines develop. So, those that might want to know if they have antibodies might be somebody who thinks they had Covid, is maybe having long-term effects but never had a positive test. Maybe that’s a person that would get antibody test done. The other place they’re using these is if a patient has been vaccinated and then comes down with a case of Covid, especially if it’s a severe case, they want to find out if that person actually developed antibodies. And so in those special cases, somebody that’s actually sick, they really need to know is that person immune or not. And in most cases, if you get severe illness, you didn’t develop antibodies to the vaccine, and that’s why.

SB: Can you tell us the next steps for this kit, such as to whom will it be offered to first? I know you mentioned in our last podcast that Europe and other countries actually distributed it through clinics and other care facilities. So could you tell us a little more about?

SS: That that’s a great question. So this first authorization is for point of care use, which means it will be only used in CLIA waived settings. So that would include some pharmacies, healthcare clinics, university health centers, hospitals, emergency rooms. So this really gives an extra point of care diagnostic to those facilities that have patients come in that they really need to know whether or not they have antibodies to Covid at the time.

SB: Perhaps it’s too early to determine whether or not this is possible, but could this antibody test kit detect variant strains of the coronavirus?

SS: So remember the Test Kit doesn’t detect the strains, but it is possible that it could detect the antibodies to strains. And I’m going to go out on a limb and say that there’s a high probability that it could, and the reason for that is that the protein that this detects antibodies to is a protein that’s pretty highly conserved across the strains, and there are some minor mutations, but they’re finding that the vaccines work well against multiple strains, and so there’s good evidence that most likely this test would work well for different strains. But again, just clarify it’s not detecting the virus, it is detecting the antibodies.

SB: From this whole experience, do you expect further collaboration with now diagnostics or other labs of the sort?

SS: So I actually have some current collaborations with Now Diagnostics. In fact, one of my master students, Caitlin Hicks, is going to be doing some work with them this summer and her masters project is likely to be in collaboration with them, which is pretty awesome. We also have some joint work with Dr. Bob Beitle and I and Now Diagnostics and another researcher in New York. So there’s one other collaboration I have on campus with Now Diagnostics, doing serology study where we’re looking at the antibodies that people have amongst the faculty, staff and students on campus. Which originally started to try to see how many cases there were on campus. But at this point since so many of our so much of our campus community is vaccinated, and especially the people that are joining the study tend to be vaccinated, we’re actually able to use that to look at how well the antibody test is working to detect the antibodies that we make in response to the vaccine. So that study is ongoing on campus, and hopefully we’re throwing around some ideas for some other serology studies that we can continue with them as well.

SB: What was it like waiting on the FDA to give you an approval?

SS: I mean the politically correct answer would be that, you know, this is just how long it takes, and that’s the way that it should be. That being said, this wasn’t the UA, and you usually expect a faster response, and so I think, you know, before we submitted in May of last… of 2020, the responses were coming back pretty quickly, and I think we got on the tail end of sort of that first round of antibody tests that were requesting emergency use authorization. And that was around the same time that the vaccine studies were beginning and there were treatments that were being submitted for EUA as well. And so I think we just got caught in this kind of time warp where the FDA was… So, it’s been actually very nerve-wracking. We’ve… wondering, you know, we’ve done studies. We’ve had independent studies that were done with this test. But they do communicate regularly with the company, and so we knew that they received it. We knew when it was assigned to agent and all of that. So it we did know that it hadn’t gotten forgotten. But the question was always still in the back of my mind, maybe they found something wrong with it. So it was really nerve wracking and you know, as you mentioned it, faculty are just not used to this process. I think that maybe you know in the company at it now diagnostics where they apply for more FDA approval, they’re kind of used to this drawn out process of the FDA approving things, but for us I’m used to a faster pace on that front.

SB: Well, this is exciting news. Thank you for joining us today.

SS: Thank you so much for having me, Sarah, I appreciate.

Matt McGowan: Music for Short Talks From the Hill was written and performed by local musician Ben Harris. For more information and additional podcasts, visit Arkansas Research. That’s arkansasresearch.uark.edu, the home of science and research news at the University of Arkansas.