Stewart Hutton, business lead for diagnostics at Siemens Healthineers GB&I explains how antibody testing can further aid the UK's response to COVID-19.
The potential of using further testing to allow us to continue to navigate the COVID-19 pandemic – supported as it is by the UK’s world-leading life sciences sector – means that we now have options in how to manage our response.
From the outset of the pandemic, the government and the NHS have deployed considerable resources into growing our testing capability. These measures were vital to the UK’s early pandemic response before effective vaccines had become reality. This focus was completely understandable, and mass vaccination has proven central to the government’s success in the fight against COVID-19. This effort was supported by the UK’s life sciences sector, which has helped to put the UK in a strong position.
As the government works on the next stage of its COVID-19 response, planning a vaccine booster programme, it has also announced the UK’s first antibody surveillance programme for up to 8,000 people a day to opt into. This is a welcome development, as we believe that such a government-led immunity surveillance programme could be the key to seeing sustained benefit of the COVID-19 vaccine. But as with all aspects of the COVID-19 response, it is vital that the government deploys the correct tools for each individual challenge, making best use of the specialist products that our sector is producing.
The role of antibody testing
Siemens Healthineers believes that antibody testing can help the government achieve its new focus of living with COVID-19. By testing whether a patient has COVID-19 antibodies we can track the continued effectiveness of vaccinations; highlight the need for boosters, and at what interval; and assess the risk of new variants on a patient’s immune response. Antibody testing can also show those who have the lowest immune response to a two-dose vaccine regime and those whose immunity has waned quickest. Using this information, we can identify and prioritise those in need of a booster jab as we approach a difficult winter.
Research is currently underway to support our knowledge of the level of antibodies required to offer protection – this could lead to situation where we can measure and quantify people’s level of COVID-19 protection, enabling us to offer boosters to those who need them. In effect, allowing us to ‘plug gaps’ in the population’s immunity in a more sustainable, more efficient and less intrusive manner. The government’s new programme is a vital step in achieving this.
Such an approach would be particularly useful for high-risk groups and professions, or other sections of society, whose immunity is lower than we would like it to be. Identifying those with a weaker immune response could minimise the need for a full-scale booster programme, allowing a targeted approach and in turn, freeing up much needed capacity within the NHS as we approach winter. It would also potentially allow excess supplies of vaccines to be supplied to developing countries.
Experts report on the efficacy of antibody testing
We need to have real conversations about how we manage the risk of COVID-19 and how we are going to protect those that are most vulnerable to it. And we need to have those conversations quickly.
That is why Siemens Healthineers recently worked with the think tank Public Policy Projects to bring together some of the country’s leading scientists on this subject to explore this issue and produce a report. They concluded that the benefits of a targeted, testing-led approach should be urgently considered, and that the UK should be encouraging partners around the world, for example in the G7, to work on developing COVID-19 antibody standards as a matter of urgency.
Making the most of our life sciences expertise
However, to make the most of this opportunity, and to take advantage of the tools that the UK’s life sciences sector is producing, the government needs to ensure that we are using the right tests to get the best results, as different types of tests have different strengths. For example, whilst the Spike IgG assays are better at assessing a person’s immune response over time, a total assay will measure total antibody concentration that are not necessarily reflective of an immune status. Tests which provide an accurate count and assessment of the immune response of an individual, gives us far greater potential to tailor the booster programme. There remains the risk that whilst the government has taken the right step towards antibody testing, it is focussing on the level of the population with antibodies, and not delving into the specifics which can help to guide our vaccine programme.
The UK is positioned to lead in this kind of work, in part thanks to its world-leading life sciences and medical research sectors. And it is to the strengths of these sectors that we must look. Antibody testing can be a key investigational tool, helping our medical research community and the NHS monitor the population, specifically helping to identify those with a sub-optimal vaccine response. Companies such as Siemens Healthineers, which has three manufacturing sites here in the UK, are key potential partners to support this work.
The strength of this collaborative approach has already been demonstrated time and again through the pandemic, not least in the Ventilator Challenge which was a great example of successful partnership between the life sciences sector and the government. As well as being a participant in the Ventilator Challenge, Siemens Healthineers manufactures blood gas products – a vital instrument in reading the level of oxygen in a patient’s blood - at our site at Sudbury. At the outset of the pandemic, this site was faced with the prospect of making a year’s worth of instruments in just two months, a challenge that was successfully met.
Such success stories, when replicated across the life sciences sector, put the UK in a strong position, not only to deal with the initial crisis, but to now look to new ways to mitigate and control the threat of COVID-19. By using the different types of antibody test that are being produced across the industry, we can maximise the potential of this approach, boost one of our world leading sectors, and help to put the NHS COVID-19 response on a much more manageable and sustainable footing for the future.
