NEW YORK – Thermo Fisher Scientific said on Monday that its transplant diagnostic business has teamed up with laboratories at Emory University, Stanford University, the University of Cincinnati, and the University Health Network in Toronto to develop a COVID-19 antibody assay for transplant donors and recipients.
The assay, called LabScreen COVID Plus and to be provided under the firm's One Lambda brand, uses Luminex xMAP technology to detect multiple antibodies and fragments and will be available for research use only in August. Thermo Fisher also plans to submit it to the US Food and Drug Administration for Emergency Use Authorization.
"A semi-quantitative multiplex assay that can simultaneously detect the response to spike, receptor-binding domain, nucleocapsid, and other SARS-CoV-2 proteins will be a huge step forward towards fully characterizing the immune response to COVID-19," said Robert Bray, codirector of the Emory University Hospital HLA laboratory, in a statement.