May 20, 2020—Oxford Immunotec announced the release of the research use only T-Spot Discovery SARS-CoV-2 test kit.
T-Spot Discovery SARS-CoV-2 builds on the company’s experience with tuberculosis diagnosis and the assessment of immune response to cytomegalovirus in transplant patients. The technology interrogates the immune system’s T cell response and will enable research into the measurement of the strength of that response to SARS-CoV-2. The strength of this response may be linked to protection from reinfection, the company said in a press release.
“Not everyone with COVID-19 infection has detectable antibodies in serology tests, and this may be a bigger problem in the majority who experience only mild or no symptoms. Also, it is not yet clear whether the presence of antibodies confers immunity,” Phill Keefe, senior vice president of product design, development, and delivery, Oxford Immunotec, said in the release. “T cell responses develop before antibody generation and can independently provide protection, so studying T cells could give us new insights into immunity to COVID-19.”
T-Spot technology uses a standardized sample prepared from peripheral blood, which standardizes cell numbers in the test to normalize for cell number variations between samples and allows the number of responding T cells to be enumerated for a more precise assessment of the T cell response.