2020/09/30
Keio University School of Medicine
A research group from Keio University School of Medicine, led by Professor Tsutomu Takeuchi and Project Assistant Professor Masaru Takeshita of the Department of Rheumatology and Collagen Diseases, and Professor Hideyuki Saya of the Division of Gene Regulation at the Institute for Advanced Medical Research, has successfully developed an assay kit for measuring neutralizing antibodies against the novel coronavirus (SARS-CoV-2) in a joint research project with JSR Corporation and its consolidated subsidiary, Medical & Biological Laboratories Co., Ltd. This kit is simple, providing results in under two hours, and performance tests have shown a high correlation with the results of neutralization tests using infectious viruses.
Generally, when a person contracts an infectious disease, defensive factors called antibodies are produced in the body. Antibodies specifically recognize and bind to various parts of a pathogen, but their ability to protect against infection varies. Antibodies that can inactivate a virus by binding to its critical active sites and inhibiting its function are called "neutralizing antibodies." Until now, measuring neutralizing antibodies for SARS-CoV-2 required experiments using infectious viruses in special facilities capable of pathogen containment. The joint research group has now created the receptor-binding domain of the Spike protein, which is crucial for the virus to enter human cells, and the ACE2 protein, which is the receptor on human cells, thereby reproducing the viral infection process within the kit. Neutralizing antibodies can be measured by quantifying the degree to which neutralizing antibodies in the serum inhibit this process. Since the kit does not contain any virus, it can be used in a standard laboratory at BSL-1.
Medical & Biological Laboratories Co., Ltd. is preparing this kit for commercialization as a research reagent. This is expected to greatly facilitate the understanding of patients' immune status and the performance evaluation of vaccines under development.
Please see below for the full press release.