The Translational Genomics Research Institute, an affiliate of City of Hope, is looking for patients recovered from COVID-19 to participate in the COVID Immunity Study.
Participants in The COVID Immunity Study must be U.S. residents, age 18 or older, have tested positive for COVID-19, and then recovered.
This is a research study, and will not be used to diagnose disease among the participants. The study could eventually lead to new methods of diagnosing COVID-19, and help in the development of antibody therapies and vaccines.
“We are using cutting-edge research tools to study, in depth, the immune response to COVID-19,” John Altin, assistant professor in TGen’s Pathogen and Microbiome Division, the institute’s infectious-disease branch in Flagstaff, said in a statement. “Our goal is to enable urgently-needed new diagnostics and treatments for this virus.”
David Engelthaler, director of TGen North and Arizona’s former state epidemiologist, said the study could help better understand how the virus has moved through our community.
“This will help us learn more about how, when and why we produce antibodies in response to a COVID-19 infection. One class of antibodies tackles the infection first, and then another comes in to finish the job,” Engelthaler said in a statement. “Knowing when these different immune responses occur, and how long they last, could help us understand if some patients gain a certain degree of immunity against reinfection. We need to know how that works.”
“To supplement this study, I am leading a research project at City of Hope, in collaboration with Dr. Altin’s lab, that will hopefully result in the development of a COVID-19 virus antibody neutralization test. Together, these two tests will help us understand what is necessary for immune protection against COVID-19,” John Zaia, director of the Center for Gene Therapy at City of Hope, said in a statement.
Those who sign up for TGen’s study will be asked to complete a short online health questionnaire. TGen would then mail them a simple blood-spot collection kit. They would be instructed to prick the end of a finger and put a drop of blood on a sample collection card. A week later, they would put another drop of blood on the sample collection card, and then mail the test back to TGen.
“Our approach will not only tell you which proteins are being targeted, but also be able to tell which regions of each protein are being targeted,” Altin said. “Each protein can be recognized by many different types of antibodies. By looking at this level of detail, we then could see elements of the antibody response that others might be missing.”
