The platform uses respiratory organoids that adequately model viral infection in the human respiratory tract, enabling accurate assessment of the effectiveness of antibodies and vaccines against SARS-CoV-2, the virus responsible for COVID-19.

The research article, titled “Organoid-based neutralization assays reveal a distinctive profile of SARS-CoV-2 antibodies and recapitulate the real-world efficacy,” is published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Comparing the conventional cell line-based method usually used by the scientific community and the organoid platform developed by HKUMed, Professor Yuen Kwok-Yung, Chair of Infectious Diseases and Henry Fok Professor in Infectious Diseases, a contributor to the study, stated, “Our study revolutionizes the long-standing cell line-based methods for evaluating antibody neutralization efficacy.