High content screening for the serology and treatment of SARS-CoV-2 infection

The COVID-19 pandemic, caused by SARS-CoV-2, has presented a global need for research efforts enabling the interventions, as well as to discover the disease biology and pathology. Here, we described our two high-content, cell-based assays to 1) identify antivirals and, 2) understand the development of antigen responses/immunity against the virus in the infected individuals.

The drug sensitivity and resistance testing (DSRT) technology, established earlier by us to repurpose targeted therapies for cancer patients, was used to develop a high throughput platform for drug testing of >1000 compounds against the SARS-CoV-2 infection using different cell lines with cell viability -based readout, with further validation with image-based assays. The top hits are currently being tested in rodent infection models.

We have also set up a rapid and accurate high-capacity serological method to measure the antibodies against SARS-CoV-2. The assay is a next-generation miniaturized version of the indirect immunofluorescence assay (IFA) commonly applied in viral serodiagnostics. Here we show how the assay enables machine-learning -guided detection of up to three immunoglobulin (Ig) classes from a single sample in a high throughput manner with high sensitivity and specificity, enabling quantitative data interpretation and visualization.