COVID-19 exposure risks and protective measures in East London's healthcare and academic sectors: Insights and applications of GloBody technology for infectious disease monitoring.

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic highlighted the need for effective protection and rapid development of tests to track and quantify seroconversion through natural infection and vaccination. Recombinant proteins, consisting of the SARS-CoV-2 nucleocapsid and Spike Receptor Binding Domains (RBD) fused with nanoluciferase reporters (GloBodies) were designed and produced. The SARS-CoV-2 specific antibody within serum, from venous blood or eluted from local or remotely-obtained dried blood spots, form a complex with the GloBody, which can be captured on immobilized Protein G or anti-isotype antibody with the retained nanoluciferase activity being proportional to specific antibody levels. Natural infection, vaccination and human and animal SARS-CoV-2 specific antibodies were detectable. These were used to serially monitor infection and vaccination responses in dental healthcare workers (n=82), medical healthcare workers (n=72) and laboratory-based scientists (n=62) within the Royal London, dental and medical hospitals and associated university research institute in Whitechapel, East London. This indicated temporally distinct infection and vaccination profiles, consistent with hospital deployments and local and national lockdowns by dentists and scientists. As such, medical healthcare workers had twice the odds of experiencing COVID-19 symptoms (2.01 95%CI 1.13-3.58. P10 RBD GloBody titres (1.18. 95%CI 1.09-1.26. P<0.001). The GloBody technology proved to be a versatile and scalable platform for rapid deployment. Copyright The copyright holder for this preprint is the author/funder, who has granted medRxiv a license to display the preprint in perpetuity. It is made available under a CC-BY 4.0 International license.