New research out of Stanford is predicting how severe a new case of COVID-19 will be through the study of antibodies.
By taking blood samples from patients recently infected with coronavirus, scientists have found a discrepancy between people who develop serious symptoms of the virus and those who have a mild case.
"What we were able to see was, in fact, people who progressed to more severe symptoms did have a different type of antibody in their blood," Taia Wang, assistant professor of infectious diseases and of microbiology and immunology at Stanford, told KCBS Radio's "Ask An Expert."
Wang is the lead author of the newfound research, which may lead to a breakthrough in how COVID-19 is treated down the line.
She explained that the antibodies that caused intense COVID-19 symptoms had a handful of unique characteristics.
"One is they did not have early neutralizing activity, which means the activity that can directly block infection. They also had an interesting quality which is a pro-inflammatory nature, so they can trigger a rapid inflammatory response," she said.
Wang and her team discovered the discrepancies by studying the composition of an antibody which is shaped like a Y.
"The arms of the Y bind to a target, so one of the things that can change is the composition of the arms of the Y, what target do they capture," Wang said. "Then the second aspect that can change is the tail of the Y. It actually has different structural features, in particular there’s a sugar on the tail that is very important for the function of antibodies. Over time, the composition of those sugars can change."
Currently, testing the ability of the antibody to block the virus can happen fairly rapidly, providing results in a day or two, Wang said. However, studying the sugar on the tail of the antibody is not yet in rapid test form.
"This is something that's underway, it's hopefully going to be one of the exciting new developments in the next year that will allow us to do a more in-depth analysis of people's antibodies," she said.
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