Bay Street Pharmacy, located at 7746 Bay Street, near Sebastian, today announced a new partnership with The American Pharmacists Association Foundation (APhA Foundation) and NOWDiagnostics, Inc. to provide in pharmacy COVID-19 antibody testing in Sebastian, Florida.
Antibody testing offers important utility to understand immunity following COVID-19 infection, and potentially therapy and vaccination—for individuals, healthcare providers, businesses, community, and governments. The ADEXUSDx® test offers a fast and easy way to check for COVID-19 antibodies.
Through this partnership, Bay Street Pharmacy will offer NOWDiagnostics’ ADEXUSDx® COVID-19 antibody test, a rapid-results self-contained fingerstick test that accurately detects the presence of COVID-19 antibodies in 15 minutes. Pharmacists will help patients to perform the test correctly, ensure validity of the test, and offer interpretation of the results. Results will be released via APhA Foundation’s RxTest.SolutionsTM, a secure and innovative technology platform that streamlines consumer and provider access to test results.
The ADEXUSDx® COVID-19 antibody test detects antibodies that bind to the receptor-binding domain (RBD) subunit of the S1 spike protein of the SARS-CoV-2 virus. The most protective antibodies develop against this portion of the spike protein S1 domain and are induced by vaccination.
Other antibody tests, designed to detect nucleocapsid antibodies, will not detect antibodies elicited by the vaccine, only those elicited through natural infection.
While the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has not released guidance yet for companies to conduct the trials necessary to make the claim of determining antibody response due to vaccination and therefore have not authorized any antibody tests for this specific indication, research studies underway have identified individuals who test positive for antibodies to COVID-19 with the ADEXUSDx® COVID-19 antibody test, and who did not report prior COVID-19 disease but did receive a COVID-19 vaccine.