A new test can help reveal whether you're immune to COVID-19
But an international group of researchers recently developed a different tool to help assess COVID-19 immunity: a blood test that can measure T cells, white blood cells that work alongside virus-fighting antibodies to mount an immune response. Their work is described into another T-cell test, called T-Detect, last year—but it tends to be labor- and time-intensive, says study co-author Ernesto Guccione, a professor of oncological sciences at New York City’s Tisch Cancer Institute at Mount Sinai.
The test has been licensed to the U.K.-based biotechnology company Hyris and is already in use in Europe. The FDA is still reviewing the technology, so it’s not yet available in the U.S. Testing for antibodies only tells part of the story, since T cells are also a critical piece of the body’s immune response. And while antibody levels drop off significantly within a few months of vaccination or infection, cellular immunity can last up to a year, Guccione says. “Monitoring both will give us a much clearer picture [of immunity] and will hopefully inform our re-vaccination strategies,” Guccione says.
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