Current Progress At Hudson Alpha

WAAY 31 News at 6 featured Dr. Richard Myers, the President and Science Director for Huntsville Alpha Institute for Bio-Technology.

6:00 p.m.

We're taking you deep er into the impact of the coronavirus.

>> najahe sherman: and tonight we are joined by dr. richard myers, the president and science director for huntsville alpha institute for bio-technology.

Thank you so much for being with us this evening.

>> dr. myers: thank you, najahe and dan.

>> najahe sherman: we understand hudson alpha is do ago lot in the fight of coronavirus including a partnership with huntsville hospital for a therapy for the virus.

What is the current progress so far.

>> dr. myers: that project is very exciting because we, along with many others, are trying this arpd the country to develop antibodies that we can then produce on industrial scale that could be used to inactivate the virus.

H.u.d.

Song alpha and one of our companies i repertoire is working on this project.

And we just set up about two or three weeks ago, set up a project with huntsville hospital to collect blood samples from about 15 patients who have come in with -- confirmed with coronavirus -- sars cov-2.

And use that to source antibod ies that could be activating.

It's a great collaboration.

It went really quickly to set it up, get the ra approvals and everything done, and huntsville hospital sent over the first samples from a patient on last friday.

We're already working on it.

>> dan shaffer: big campus wha.

Other projects are underway out there?

>> dr. myers: there are probably a dozen different projects between hudson alpha itself, the nonprofit research institute but plus our 45 biotech companies.

And a bunch of them are working on various things in including multiple ways of testing with the virus.

We also within the institute are working in collaboration with a lab in new york city to try to see if we can develop a very rapid test for testing for possible immunity by taking blood and seeing if we can do that on a very high scale.

And i think relevant for the conversation about nursing homes and many, many other groups is testing for the virus itself.

And the reason i think we do need to be care.

About allocating the tests is because they're still a little expensive and the supply chain and the ability to apply these is somewhat limiting.

As mr. spillers said, i think we should apply those to where they're needed the most, people that are ill.

But there is this notion of doing population screening.

What if we could do that same kind of test for the virus.

20 to 30 times cheaper than we can currently, maybe even a lot cheaper than that, and do hundreds of thousands of them in a day.

And that's a technology problem as well as the how do you collect that many samples to be able to do that.

But we're working in several groups often our campus as well as other places to actually make that happen.

And i think if we do come up with the ability to do the testing that way where the sample collection could be rapid possibly, almost surely from sal live va as opposed to nasal swab, then such a screening approach would be possible.

It's not the same as the clinical test where you have the patient there and you know that somebody's sick and you suspect it's covid, it's actually screening asymptomatic people who don't even think they've been exposed, necessarily, like in the nursing homes or even in larger groups and companies and schools.

There are multiple problems with that and we don't want to get too complacent with it.

Even if we have such a test there's an issue you could have sars cov3 one day and the next day you could have it.

Probably you would have to do the testing multiple times, even if you miss some of those, it's probably better to have this than not to have it, especially if we can make it fast, cheap, and importantly, accurate.

>> najahe sherman: and you mentioned the importance of that expanding testing.

And hospitals have told us right now that we're in a pretty good spot but where do we still need to see some improvements?

>> dr. myers: well, mr. spillers and the folks at the clinics can answer that a little better than i can, but i do know, because we're doing a lot of the clinical testing for various hospitals and clinics here in huntsville and around the state and really around the country and our associate companies, and those tests are very, very good.

They're accurate.

They're even pretty fast.

You can get the results back, not in 15 minutes but in the same day.

So that's working pretty well.

There have been supply chain problems from the very beginning those are hiccups that are really sometimes hard to over come.

But we seem to be doing pretty well now.

Now, we're doing well so far in madison county and north alabama , or at least much of north alabama, not everywhere, because we've not had huge numbers of cases.

So we haven't overwhelmed the medical system.

That could really change in a matter of a day or two, if we, you know, have an outbreak and we certainly could if we're not careful about social distancing, masks.

Testing for virus is not the only thing that needs to be done symptom checking, tracing, all of those things are important add unjunkets.

>> dan shaffer: you mentioned accuracy.

How much of a concern is accuracy and what is the ideal percentage?

>> dr. myers: so the good thing is the test for the virus itself , these are based on the virus genetic sequence.

And nobody's relying on one little tiny piece of the virus.

They're testing multiple places.

So you have some redundancy built in there to make sure you don't get false positives and false negatives.

Either one of those is -- can be particularly bad.

A false negative rate is probably a little higher than the false positive rate.

The false positive rate meaning who gets a positive test when they don't actual actually have the virus is very low, far lower than .1%.

I don't actually know the number but it's way down there.

The false negative you could miss it because you haven't collected the sample correctly.

Early in this pandemic there were places that this was happening.

I think the medical personnel have really learned how to do this and do it well so it's much better now.

>> najahe sherman: we're also hearing a lot about antibody testing in different locations here in the huntsville area that offer that.

Who should get antibody testing?

>> dr. myers: so antibody testing is really to see whether you have immunity.

There are two problems with that a lot of the tests that came out early on and there were many of them, were extremely inaccurate.

You could buy them online from companies that we didn't even know existed days before.

So that was part of the problem.

So they have to be accurate.

And what you're really testing for is somebody who had covid and has recoloradod from it.

They may not know they had it.

Are they carrying antibodies around protecting them from subsequent infection for instance.

And the answer is almost surely yes to some extent.

We just don't know how much protection you have or how long it will last.

So we have to have an accurate test, first of all.

And if we want to really apply this, it would be great to apply it in a high threw put way to tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of people.

That could be one of the answer s here.

But we still don't know how much immunity you are getting if you have -- if you are carrying antibodies.

>> dan shaffer: we only have about 30 seconds left but i want to quickly mention vaccines.

I've heard we haven't produced a vaccine for any of the coronaviruses through the years.

Are we any closer to getting a vaccine?

>> dr. myers: so we're not working on that at all here but following it very closely.

The answer is many, many groups are working really good scientists who know a lot about vaccine development and they're promising results.

It's still going to take a while to get this done because you have to do clinical trials to make sure that you're not -- that it's safe, but i'm convinced we will get vaccines and hopefully multiple ones so we have multiple shots on goal.