Advances in Neutralization Assays for SARS‐CoV‐2

Abstract

The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID‐19) pandemic has triggered a global health emergency and brought disaster to humans. Tremendous efforts have been made to control the pandemic, among which neutralizing antibodies (NAbs) are of specific interest to researchers. Neutralizing antibodies are generated within weeks after infection or immunization and can protect cells from virus intrusion and confer protective immunity to cells. Thus, production of NAbs is considered as a main goal for severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS‐CoV‐2) vaccines and NAbs may be used for patient treatment in the form of monoclonal antibodies. Neutralization assays are capable of quantitatively detecting NAbs against SARS‐CoV‐2, allowing to explore the relationship between the level of NAbs and the severity of the disease, and may predict the possibility of re‐infection in COVID‐19 patients. They can also be used to test the effects of monoclonal antibodies, convalescent plasma and vaccines. At present, wild‐type virus neutralization assay remains the gold standard for measuring Nabs, while pseudovirus neutralization assays, Surrogate virus neutralization test (sVNT) and high‐throughput versions of neutralization assays are popular alternatives with their own advantages and disadvantages. In this review article, we summarize the characteristics and recent progress of SARS‐CoV‐2 neutralization assays. Special attention is given to the current limitations of various neutralization assays so as to promote new possible strategies with NAbs by which rapid SARS‐CoV‐2 serological diagnosis and antiviral screening in the future will be achieved.

Vaccine Candidate Against COVID-19 Based on Structurally Modified Plant Virus as an Adjuvant

“…Laboratories use various approaches to evaluating nAbs titers: live virus neutralization assay, pseudovirus neutralization assay, etc. ( Lu et al, 2021 ). There are also no standard metrics for presenting the results of neutralization analysis ( Gundlapalli et al, 2020 ).…”

Predicted Symptomatic Effectiveness of Pfizer-BioNTech BNT162b2 Vaccine Against Omicron Variant of SARS-CoV-2

“…Error could also be due to the use of a pseudovirus, as what the polymutant essentially was. Even pseudoviruses created to maximally mimic natural SARS-CoV-2 viruses can have markedly different neutralisation to that of live virus by the same sera; see Figures 3 and 4 of Lu et al [2021]; Wang et al [2021]. To accommodate these uncertainties, we assumed that the actual Omicron fold could be within 80 ± 40.…”

“…See Volkov et al [2021] for more details and comparisons with effectiveness predictions made in and Chen et al [2021].…”

Enzyme-Linked Immunosorbent Assay: An Adaptable Methodology to Study SARS-CoV-2 Humoral and Cellular Immune Responses

“…Given that SARS-CoV-2 internalization is mediated by the interaction between RBD and ACE2, antibodies that inhibit this binding are potentially neutralizing [ 20 ]. Therefore, surrogate-virus neutralization tests (sVNT) check if serum sample can inhibit RBD-ACE2 interaction and were standardized using a competitive ELISA approach [ 57 ]. Interestingly, this assay allows to test samples for neutralizing antibodies without special requirements of biosafety level, cost and training, thus being suitable for automatization [ 58 , 59 ].…”