New Zealanders wanting to know how protected they are against Covid-19 infection could soon be able to have their immunity levels measured at their local pharmacy.
What it's anticipated the Orbis Arca will look like once fully developed. Photo: SUPPLIED/ Orbis Diagnostics
Biotech company Orbis Diagnostics this morning announced it has teamed up with Green Cross Health, which owns Unichem and Life pharmacies, to trial its Covid immunity testing device.
Orbis chief executive Damian Camp told First Up the device can quickly and accurately measure a person's antibody concentration as a result of vaccination.
He said knowing your risk of infection could be useful when weighing up decisions such as whether to book overseas travel or to visit elderly relatives.
"Understanding your level of immunity is going to be important" - Orbis chief executive Damian Camp
Camp explained what the device is and how it works.
"It's a desktop device that we can install at the point of care and what we can do is install our disk onto that that's sort of pre-loaded with test reagents and with that we can actually test for Covid immunity and give a quantitative result showing the concentration of antibodies in your system against Covid-19," Camp said.
He said the device takes a painless blood sample from the user's finger to measure their immunity levels which they could then use to determine whether they want a top-up vaccine dose.
The "lab in a box" called the Arca, yielded very positive results in preliminary trials, both in terms of accuracy and how easy it is to use.
Orbis scientific co-founder professor David Williams and chief technical officer Dr Matheus Vargas with a prototype platform. Photo: SUPPLIED/ Orbis Diagnostics
Last year, a clinical trial took place including a group of 170 vaccinated and unvaccinated people.
"It showed a really clear differentiation between those two groups but also quite a good spread for the individuals that were vaccinated based on time since vaccination which showed if it's a longer time since you've been vaccinated your immunity drops off," Camp said.
He said there were several factors that affected immunity levels with the biggest being time since vaccination, while age and underlying health conditions also had an affect.
"I think just understanding your level of immunity and level of protection against Covid each year as we enter into the flu season is going to be quite an important thing for some of those groups."
Although, the option of a fourth dose of vaccine was currently unavailable to people whose immunity levels were found to be waning, it would enable people to have a greater idea of how cautious they should be with Covid-19.
Until more vaccine options were made available, Camp said it could help people determine whether or not to go to a crowded place or visit a country prevalent with Covid, based on their immunity levels.
He expected a range of people would be interested in the test, including people who were simply curious about their immunity levels and also employers who wanted to encourage workers to come back to the office.
Camp said the test would be on sale in 4-6 weeks through a commercial pilot with Green Cross Health for around $100.