A long-standing study on immunity to COVID-19 has exposed promising data about the still-mysterious disease, says one of its lead researchers, but she fears her investment will soon run out.
The Stop the Spread project, a collaboration between the Ottawa Hospital Research Institute (OHRI) and the University of Ottawa, has been tracking COVID-19 antibody responses in many other people since October 2020.
For the first 10 months of the project, about 1,000 people sent in monthly samples of their blood, saliva or sputum — a mixture of saliva and mucus — for analysis.
The researchers then narrowed this organization down to about three hundred and continued to track them as vaccines evolved and new variants emerged.
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While there are other longitudinal COVID-19 studies underway, Stop the Spread is notable because it launched so early in the pandemic that some participants hadn’t even fallen ill yet, said Dr. Angela Crawley, a cellular immunologist with OHRI and one of the project’s co-investigators.
This gave them intact cells and plasma during the COVID-19 virus, a unique baseline, Crawley said, from which they have since tracked adjustments in immune responses and antibody levels.
But as the fourth anniversary of the pandemic approaches, she and other researchers worry that enthusiasm for investing in COVID-19 studies like Stop the Spread is waning, and that could have implications for how Canada approaches outbreaks in the long term.
“Investment in research has gone down and, you know, things are changing,” he said. “So a lot of what was built is in danger of collapsing. “
Stop the Spread got roughly $2 million from the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR), the country’s health research granting agency, to follow that first 10-month cohort, and then leveraged that initial work to keep the money flowing for several more years.
During that time, and thanks in large part to advanced machine learning — a form of artificial intelligence that allows computers to adapt and draw inferences from data without explicitly being programmed to do so — the team teased out intriguing relationships from all the COVID-19 data in their hands.
For example, Crawley said he discovered “pretty compelling” evidence of a link between sex and a person’s ability to generate antibodies.
Across all age categories, knowledge suggests that women are slower to excrete antibodies than men, Crawley said. The difference is clearest in younger age groups, with antibody loss rates converging with those of older people.
That sort of data, Crawley said, can help “fine-tune” future public health responses to COVID-19, which could include vaccines that better account for those differences in age and sex.
“The degree of sophistication of our antibody reaction is similar to our ability to neutralize the virus,” Crawley said. “We’re not talking about coverage opposite to infection, i. e. , verbal exchange, but coverage opposite to the severity of the disease, which means a lot when you’re talking about respiratory infections. “
In addition to CIHR’s investment, Stop the Spread also secured investment from the COVID-19 Immunity Task Force (CITF), created through the Public Health Agency of Canada (PHAC) at the beginning of the pandemic.
Its mandate is, among other things, to fund studies on immunity to COVID-19 that would help Canadian policymakers make “evidence-based decisions. “According to PHAC, it has distributed nearly $230 million for clinical efforts since its launch in 2020.
But researchers studying COVID-19 are concerned about the evaporation of global money, said Dawn Bowdish, a professor at McMaster University and Canada’s research chair on aging and immunity.
“The number of COVID outbreaks we have continues to disrupt care. It’s still costing other people their health and their lives,” said Bowdish, who has followed more than 1,000 citizens receiving long-term care as part of his own COVID-19 research.
“But there’s just no appetite to acknowledge that it’s still a problem, and that’s incredibly frustrating, because the paints we make are applied to all kinds of infections. “
The federal government has invested $430 million through CIHR into nearly 1,000 COVID-19 research projects since the start of the pandemic, said PHAC spokesperson André Gagnon.
The company still acknowledges that the virus “poses a serious threat to fitness,” Gagnon wrote in an email to CBC, and CIHR is now a think tank focused on preparing for a pandemic and other fitness crises. Array Y while it continues to fund projects on topics such as COVID-19 misinformation and long COVID, it also “recognizes the desire to shift investment priorities to respond to existing events. “
“[CIHR continues] to run 100+ funding competitions every year to invest research into other priority areas for people in Canada, such as cancer, heart disease, dementia, the opioid crisis and ways to strengthen Canada’s health-care systems,” he wrote.
The CITF, meanwhile, is slated to wrap up its work in March 2024, Gagnon added.
Bowdish says his studios will only receive investment until the end of this year. Meanwhile, Crawley says CIHR’s Stop the Spread investment will run out in March and that they are looking to expand it to stick to a smaller group of about a hundred more people until mid-2025.
(Crawley is conducting parallel studies on T cells and immunity that are funded solely through the CITF until later this year. With all the work they have to do, he says they may not be able to get them to do it to their satisfaction. )
“This literally breaks our hearts. We hope we can find a way to do that for Canadians,” he said.
Ending the Stop the Spread project would make for a missed opportunity, said participants Jim and Christine Bonta, who’ve been part of the cohort since 2020 and recently signed on to continue into 2024.
“It would be knowledge lost, in particular about the effects of long COVID,” said Jim Bonta. “I don’t have long COVID, but I guess I would be [part of] a comparison group.”
“COVID is still circulating. And we don’t know when this is going to go away, if it will go away, and what else is going to emerge,” added Christine Bonta, a retired nurse.
“We have to be in a position for that, [because] in 2020 we were not prepared. “
For Crawley, who is also the Director of the CIHR-funded Coronavirus Variant Rapid Response Network (CoVaRR-Net) Biobank, the ideal situation would be to secure a solid investment to continue preventing the spread beyond 2025, while giving this biobank a solid foundation. in fact, nationwide.
This would mean a physical facility with samples stored in freezers, with back-end infrastructure that would allow other researchers across Canada to share knowledge and percentages of their own findings.
All contracts would provide for scientists, governments and industry to have access to this data, which would “break down silos” in clinical studies and encourage collaboration, he said.
“When there’s a pandemic, it’s no longer a question of how I can advance my career,” Crawley said. It won’t. I mean, how can we all paint together?
Crawley also said his team has great respect for the Bontas and all those who have committed more than 3 years of their lives to preventing the spread.
They feel an “almost overwhelming responsibility,” he added, to draw as much wisdom as imaginable from the knowledge they’ve gathered and to continue to collect, at least for another year and a half.
“It’s a hard labor of love, but there’s a lot to report,” she said. “And we feel a great duty to make sure that we can be informed as much as we can. “
Assigned Producer/Reporter
Trevor Pritchard is a virtual journalist and weekend producer at CBC Ottawa. It was previously reported in Toronto, Saskatoon, and Cornwall, Ontario.
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