More than a dozen “rapid response” research projects have been launched by Genome B.C. aimed at improving COVID-19 virus and antibody detection, and accelerating the development of treatments and vaccines.
Zabrina Brumme and Christopher Lowe are heading a collaboration aimed at creating a test that will not only reveal whether or not the virus is present in a patient, but how much virus is present in fluids and tissues all over the body.
The applications for such a test are many, said Brumme, an SFU professor and lab director for the B.C. Centre for Excellence in HIV/AIDS.
Knowing how much virus is present in a patient’s various tissues will be of “critical importance” in clinical trials of potential treatments that will be tested at St. Paul’s Hospital and sites all over the world.
A sensitive quantitative test would allow researchers to measure viral load clearance or persistence and assess a drug or course of treatment.
“Monitoring viral loads over time is an important marker of effectiveness,” said Lowe, a medical microbiologist and physician for Providence Health Care.
“A quantitative viral load assay would allow us to do that in a more sensitive way than a simple ‘yes or no’ assay allows,” said Brumme. “We want to be able to see almost in real time that this (hypothetical) drug reduced viremia by a certain amount.”