Neutralizing Antibody Tests! What are they? These kind of assays evaluate how well a virus (or protein) is neutralized by a particular pool of antibodies!
This is of particular interest this weekend because early, pre-print, data was just released, looking at the important SARS-CoV-2 mutation, N501Y. The big question has been if this mutation will allow the virus to escape antibodies produced by vaccination. Enter, the neutralizing antibody test.
The first slide of this post goes over how this test works. The second slide shows the data from the pre-print data that just came out. Source on the slides.
The data suggests that, in fact, antibodies produced by the Pfizer vaccine neutralize this N501Y mutant just as well.
Important to note that this has not yet finished peer-review and that not all mutations have yet been explored.
Posted on Instagram on January 9, 2021.