This COVID study has been tracking immunity for 3 years. Now it's running out of money

A long-running study into COVID-19 immunity has unearthed promising insights on the still-mysterious disease, one of its lead researchers says — but she's concerned its funding could soon dry up.

The Stop the Spread project, a collaboration by the Ottawa Hospital Research Institute (OHRI) and the University of Ottawa, has been monitoring antibody responses to COVID-19 in hundreds of 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 winnowed that group to about 300 and kept following them as vaccines were developed and new variants emerged.

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.

That gave them access to cells and plasma untouched by the COVID-19 virus — a unique baseline, Crawley said, from which they've since tracked changes in immune responses and antibody levels. 

But with the pandemic approaching the four-year mark, she and other researchers worry enthusiasm to fund COVID-19 research like Stop the Spread is waning — and that could have implications for how Canada tackles future outbreaks.

"Research funding has dwindled, and, you know, things change," she said. "So a lot of what we've built is under threat of collapse."

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 instance, Crawley said they've uncovered "pretty compelling" evidence of a link between one's biological sex and one's ability to generate and maintain antibodies.

Across all age categories, the data seems to suggest women are slower to shed antibodies than men, Crawley said. The distinction is sharpest in younger age groups, with rates of antibody loss gradually converging the older people get.

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.

"How sophisticated our antibody response is relates to how well we can neutralize the virus," said Crawley. "We're not talking about protection against infection — that's a different conversation — but protection against disease severity, which means a lot when you talk about respiratory infections."