Abstract
During the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, serology has suffered several manufacturing and budget bottlenecks. Kode technology exposes exogenous antigens on the surface of cells; in the case of red blood cells, modified cells are called kodecytes, making antibody–antigen reactions detectable by the old-fashioned hemagglutination test. In this commentary, we review evidence supporting the utility of SARS-CoV-2 Spike kodecytes for clinical diagnostic purposes and serosurveys in resource-poor settings.
Highlights
The transfusion medicine community has been involved in COVID-19 research under many different facets, ranging from blood donation shortages and COVID-19 convalescent plasma (CCP) donor identification [1] to the provision of blood components and derivatives to COVID-19 patients [2] and identifying ABO proteins as risk factors for COVID-19 severity [3]
The majority of serological point-of-care tests (POCT) developed to date for SARS-CoV-2 rely on lateral flow immunochromatographic assays (LFIA): they are cheap and scalable, but they do not offer quantitative information or leave any record of the reaction, and they suffer from poor sensitivity
Blood components are within the WHO list of essential medicines, and hemagglutination tests (HAT) (based on the principle of visible red blood cell (RBC) agglutination) are pillars of modern transfusion medicine
Summary
Publisher’s Note: MDPI stays neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. If a hemagglutinating pathogen is the known reagent, the HAI assay can be used to detect the antibody. Such “C19-kodecytes” are agglutinated in the presence of SARS-CoV-2 antibodies in a patient’s serum or plasma using routine immunohematology platforms.
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