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.”

Biological sex and antibodies

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…