Kim Hamad-Schifferli says key to coronavirus diagnostic test could be off-the-shelf antibodies
Testing for COVID-19, more commonly known as the coronavirus, is critical given the current global pandemic. UMass Boston Associate Professor of Engineering . She developed a procedure within weeks that she says could help with COVID-19 diagnostics.
鈥淲e have a procedure that you can use for any disease, and what we鈥檙e trying to do now is adapt it to use it to detect COVID-19,鈥 Hamad-Schifferli said. 鈥淎 lot of people are wondering around like, 鈥業 don鈥檛 know if I have it,鈥 and this could be a way to know as a precautionary step.鈥
Hamad-Schifferli is a visiting scientist in the Department of Mechanical Engineering at MIT. She and her research collaborators, including Jose Gomez-Marquez of MIT鈥檚 , discovered about four years ago when Zika came about that you can take antibodies for a known disease to make a diagnostic test for an emerging disease.
鈥淲hen there is a new outbreak, it takes time to make the antibodies needed in a point of care diagnostic, usually about one year. We came up with a way to use off-the-shelf reagents and can generate a test with existing stockpiles of antibodies within a few weeks. We also use the same principle to hack an existing commercial diagnostic test to detect something new,鈥 Hamad-Schifferli said.
For their successful yellow fever test, they used dengue fever and Zika antibodies, as shown in the illustration above. For COVID-19, they鈥檙e using closely related antibodies.
鈥淥bviously the landscape is changing dramatically right now and you know every half hour something new happens, but we think that this could be used as a test,鈥 Hamad-Schifferli said. 鈥淭he important thing is that the format of the test is something that you can reconfigure easily. So it鈥檚 not this self-contained thing. If you鈥檙e a clinic and you run out of reagents, you can sort of snap them together like Lego blocks and make a test set that鈥檚 modifiable on the spot.鈥
Hamad-Schifferli says they have a system that can generate the right viral reporters within three weeks. Once the tests are engineered, MIT has the capacity to make them. She and Gomez-Marquez are already in contact with clinics.
A $25,000 grant from UMass President Marty Meehan鈥檚 office and the in 2018 provided funding for Hamad-Schifferli鈥檚 work on emerging diseases. The patent-pending procedure is described in a paper currently available on as it undergoes peer review. Cristina Rodriguez-Quijada, a fourth-year PhD student in biomedical engineering, is a coauthor on the paper along with Hamad-Schifferli and Gomez-Marquez.