Chris Yates, Abingdon Health
Credit: Charlotte Graham
Days after Britain first locked down in March, there was a glimmer of hope. Myriads of antibody tests, which could tell whether someone had contracted Covid-19 previously, were being ordered by the Government.
They had the “potential to be a total game-changer”, Prime Minister Boris Johnson said, getting millions back to work and, possibly, forming the basis for immunity certificates.
These tests would work by pricking people’s fingers to take a small drop of blood, and then show results on whether somebody had antibodies, which had been produced in response to a previous infection, within as little as 20 minutes.
At Abingdon Health, efforts to create such tests were already underway. The Government’s life sciences champion Sir John Bell had contacted the diagnostic test maker and asked for its help in developing an antibody test.
The problem was, Britain’s diagnostic industry wasn’t large enough. No one company could ramp up quickly enough. They would need to form a consortium, Sir John had said.
“When I called up the bosses of competitors on a Sunday, they must have thought why on Earth is this guy calling me,” laughs Chris Yates, the chief executive of York-based Abingdon. “But I asked them if they could be on a call that afternoon to go through how this would work. After that, we developed a test as quickly as we could.”
Now, ten months later, Abindgon’s antibody tests have been created. The tests, thought to cost in the high single digits each, have even received regulatory approval. "Actually, [they are] much more relevant with the vaccines coming online”, says Yates.
"If there is scarcity of supply, the tests could help target the vaccine doses to people that maybe don’t already have neutralising antibodies…That’s something that’s cropped up a lot over the last few days.”
But, so far, for the general public, it appears such antibody tests have barely materialised.
There are a few reasons why this might be the case. For months, there was serious debate over what exactly antibody tests showed, and whether it was correct to link antibodies to any sort of immunity. What’s more, Abingdon’s test faced scrutiny over their accuracy.
Abingdon completed its initial order of one million tests to the Government earlier this month and, as it stands, has no further orders with the Department for Health.
Those that have been delivered are reserved for healthcare workers. Reports last week claimed the Government had decided against taking up options for millions more orders after the test failed to get approval for “home” use, instead only having approval for the tests to be administered by healthcare professionals.
Abingdon argues there were no further orders to fulfil, and that the Department for Health is instead switching to a dynamic purchasing system, where companies bid to supply the Government.
“They’re just moving towards a more traditional tender process,” 46-year-old Yates says. “We’ve clarified that really in previous statements.”
For some, this may ring alarm bells. Abingdon, which in December floated on the AIM market, had already come under intense scrutiny late last year after researchers with Public Health England said its test was not as accurate at detecting antibodies as previously thought.
The prospect of now having to bid to supply the Government, rather than having an existing deal with options for more tests, may appear daunting.
But Yates isn’t feeling pessimistic over the company’s future. He brushes off the November Public Health England report. “I don’t feel defensive about it. You have to have a healthy debate on the science.”
Chris Yates
The company maintains its test was incorrectly compared with others, and that it had concerns with the research. It says it worked with academics to verify accuracy, and that the Department for Health “is satisfied with the performance of the test”.
In fact, on video link from his home in York, where he lives with his wife and three children, Yates appears upbeat. There may be no existing contracts in place for the antibody tests, and they may not have taken off over the past year — but, Yates says, antibody testing is needed now more than ever.
To understand why this is, it is important to look at how Abingdon’s tests work and what they actually show.
Over the past year, one of the biggest criticisms of antibody testing was that it wasn’t clear what purpose they served — whether the presence of antibodies in someone’s system meant they would be immune to the virus, or not. In fact, as recently as September, Sir John said the focus had turned away from such tests, saying: “We still don’t really know what antibodies do to protect you.”
But, things have moved on since then. Earlier this month, Public Health England confirmed that those who had previously contracted Covid-19 did have antibodies and could be immune for up to five months.
Abingdon says, unlike others working on antibody tests, it was always developing ones which looked for antibodies which can neutralise the virus, and so could show immunity.
“To be honest, there’s a logic to people’s immune response to viruses,” says Yates, a chartered accountant and economist by trade. “A neutralising antibody response is to be expected, there’s been evidence historically with other coronaviruses. I don’t think we doubted that antibodies had a key role to play in the body’s immune response. “The whole point of vaccines is to generate that immune response. And with vaccines coming forward, antibody testing does have an increasing role to play.”
How Abingdon envisions this working is in a number of ways — all of which require the tests to be offered more widely than just to healthcare staff.
Its tests, for example, could be used to tell how long vaccines can offer immunity for. “Whilst there is more and more evidence in terms of how long antibody response lasts, this is something that can be measured using our antibody tests,” Yates says.
They could also form part of a “screening” process, alongside Covid-19 virus tests, to allow people to return into work or to travel by proving they had antibodies in their system that neutralised the virus — and, Yates says, “there is a pull from the private sector for this”. “We are seeing a lot of interest.” It is still not clear whether antibodies, or the vaccine, can prevent someone from transmitting and carrying Covid-19.
It should perhaps come as no surprise that Abingdon is keen to stress all the potential uses for its tests. After all, it has been a long road to get to this point only to have no current deals with the Government. The company is in talks with other countries, although is awaiting regulatory approval in 27, including the US.
A guide to Covid testing
“The research and development, and the amount of effort our team put in over four months to develop the test, was staggering,” Yates says. “I was going in on a Saturday, going to M&S and getting a load of food for them. Those guys didn’t even have time to go shopping. They were creating this test in about a quarter of the time that you would normally develop it.”
Yates says it was a company-wide effort. “We were putting things aside to do this. My operations team did masses of work in securing components that everyone was chasing at the same time, like the paper that goes into the tests. The sales and marketing marketing team was looking at things like the instructions for use. It was a huge team effort.”
What this push of work from not just Abingdon, but its partners in the consortium — BBI Solutions, CIGA Healthcare and Omega Diagnostics, companies based in Wales, Northern Ireland and Scotland respectively — has meant is that Britain’s diagnostic industry is more robust than ever.
As it stands, Abingdon says around one million of its tests can be produced every week. By the end of the year, it is hoping this level is at 3 million tests per week.
Abingdon’s tests may have not been a “game-changer” back in March, as promised by the Government, but much has changed since then. Now, Yates says, it is ready to help. “At the end of the day, we were asked for help, and we stood up. Hopefully, we can continue to help going forward.”
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