British firm says antibody test is being validated
LONDON, (Reuters) - Prototypes of a coronavirus antibody test which could be a gamechanger in the fight against the pandemic are being assessed and are ready to be optimised, the developer of the technology said on Thursday.
Antibody tests are designed to establish whether people have previously been infected, as opposed to antigen tests which show if someone actually has the COVID-19 disease caused by the virus.
Health technology firm Mologic said assessment and validation of its COVID-19 diagnostic test had begun this week at the Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine and St Georges hospital, and that global partners would also examine the prototypes.
“Completion of the first prototypes is a significant step in Mologic’s development of a rapid diagnostic test for COVID-19 and we are proud of our team’s achievement in reaching this point so quickly, while maintaining the most rigorous standards,” said Paul Davis, CoFounder and Chief Scientific Officer at Mologic.
“Diagnostics are a critical weapon in the fight against this pandemic and, once ready, this test will enable affordable, more accurate and earlier diagnosis of infection, limiting the spread of the disease.”
Britain has bought 3.5 million antibody testing kits from different suppliers, and is currently making sure they work before distributing them.
A health official told lawmakers on Wednesday that such test kits would be available within days to be sent to households, perhaps via Amazon, saying that an unnamed prototype was being validated in Oxford this week.
NEW YORK, (Reuters) - At least one New York hospital has begun putting two patients on a single ventilator machine, an experimental crisis-mode protocol some doctors worry is too risky but others deemed necessary as the coronavirus outbreak strains medical resources.
The coronavirus causes a respiratory illness called COVID-19 that in severe cases can ravage the lungs. It has killed at least 281 people over a few weeks in New York City, which is struggling with one of the largest caseloads in the world at nearly 22,000 confirmed cases.
A tool of last resort that involves threading a tube down a patient’s windpipe, a mechanical ventilator can sustain a person who can no longer breathe unaided. The city only has a few thousand and is trying to find tens of thousands more.
Dr. Craig Smith, surgeon-in-chief at New YorkPresbyterian/Columbia University Medical Center in Manhattan, wrote in a newsletter to staff that anesthesiology and intensive care teams had worked “day and night” to get the split-ventilation experiment going.
By Wednesday, he wrote, there were “two patients being carefully managed on one ventilator.”
New York Governor Andrew Cuomo, who says his staff is struggling to find enough machines on the market, has touted the adaptation as a potential life-saver. “It’s not ideal,” he told reporters, “but we believe it’s workable.”
The U.S. Food & Drug Administration, which regulates medical device manufacturers, gave emergency authorization on Tuesday allowing ventilators to be modified using a splitter tube to serve multiple COVID-19 patients, though manufacturers still must share safety information with regulators. Some medical associations oppose the unproven method. On Thursday, the Society of Critical Care Medicine, the American Association for Respiratory Care and four other practitioner groups issued a joint statement saying the practice “should not be attempted because it cannot be done safely with current equipment.”
It is difficult enough to fine-tune a ventilator to keep alive even one patient with acute respiratory distress syndrome (ARDS), the statement said; sharing it across multiple patients would worsen outcomes for all. They proposed doctors instead choose the one patient per ventilator deemed most likely to survive.
At Columbia, Smith noted that they could not split a ventilator across just any two COVID-19 patients, but were only pairing patients with sufficiently similar respiratory needs.
Across Manhattan, Mount Sinai Hospital told staff in an email that officials were “working to figure out” whether they could split ventilators. The hospital has ordered the necessary adapters, a nurse there said in an interview on condition of anonymity because she was not authorized to speak to reporters.
Experts at Columbia pointed to a 2006 study where researchers, using lung simulators, concluded that a single ventilator could sustain four adults in an emergency scenario.
One author of that study, Dr. Greg Neyman, cautioned against the application in COVID-19 cases in part because the lungs themselves are infected. If one patient’s lungs were deteriorating faster, he said, it could cause imbalances in the closed system. One patient could starve for oxygen while the other patient’s lungs would get increased pressure.
“Unless they were very very closely monitored, such a set up may end up doing more harm than good,” Neyman wrote in an email to Reuters.