A rapid, easy, and scalable whole blood monocyte CD169 assay for outpatient screening during SARS-CoV-2 outbreak, and potentially other emerging disease outbreaks.

The COVID-19 corona virus disease outbreak is globally challenging health systems and societies. Its diagnosis relies on molecular methods, with drawbacks revealed by mass screening. Upregulation of neutrophil CD64 or monocyte CD169 has been abundantly reported as markers of bacterial or acute viral infection, respectively. We evaluated the sensitivity of an easy, one-step whole blood flow cytometry assay to measure these markers within 10 min, as a potential screening test for COVID-19 patients. Patients ( We observed 98% and 100% sensitivity in early-stage ( Monocyte CD169 evaluation was highly sensitive for detecting SARS-CoV-2 infection in first-presentation patients; and it returns to basal level upon infection clearance. The potential ease of fingerprick collection, minimal time-to-result, and low cost rank this biomarker measurement as a potential viral disease screening tool, including COVID-19. When the virus prevalence in the tested population is usually low (1%-10%), such an approach could increase the testing capacity 10 to 100-fold, with the same limited molecular testing resources, which could focus on confirmation purposes only.

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Déclaration de conflit d'intérêts

Declaration of conflicting interests: The author(s) declared the following potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: TM, JMB, IAB, PB, and FM are employees of Beckman Coulter Life Sciences, IAB and PB are recipient of a PhD grant from the ANRT (National Agency for Research and Technology). JV has received speaker and consultancy fees from Meda Pharma, Mylan, Novartis, Sanofi, Thermo Fisher, outside this work. The other authors declare no conflict of interest related to this work.