Engineering Researcher’s COVID-19 Antibody Test Kit Receives FDA Emergency Use Authorization
Shannon Servoss is likely the first University of Arkansas researcher to be part of a project that has received an emergency use authorization from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.
An associate professor of chemical engineering and co-director of the Office of Undergraduate Research, Servoss spent a year working with NOWDiagnostics, a Springdale biomedical company, to develop a rapid COVID-19 antibody test kit. In May 2021, the researchers learned that the kit had received the emergency use authorization.
The kits can inform individuals who think they might have had COVID-19 or are experiencing some long-term effects, though they never had a positive test. They can also help clinicians better understand what’s going on when a vaccinated person contracts COVID-19, especially if it’s a severe case.
“They want to find out if that person actually developed antibodies,” Servoss said. “And so Engineering Researcher’s COVID-19 Antibody Test Kit Receives FDA Emergency Use Authorization in those special cases, somebody that’s actually sick, they really need to know, ‘Is that person immune or not?’ And in most cases, if you get severe illness, you didn’t develop antibodies to the vaccine.”
Servoss emphasized that the test kit does not detect the various strains of coronavirus, but it can detect antibodies to the strains.
“The reason for that is that the protein that the test kit detects antibodies to is a protein that’s pretty highly conserved across the strains,” Servoss said. “There are some minor mutations, but they’re finding that the vaccines work well against multiple strains, and so there’s good evidence that most likely this test would work well for different strains.”