Patrick Hsu

A 60 Minutes investigation revealed that federal officials knew many of the antibody tests suddenly flooding the market were seriously flawed, but continued to allow them to be sold anyway. In early March, Dr. Alex Marson of UC San Francisco, and Dr. Patrick Hsu, an assistant professor of bioengineering at UC Berkeley, assembled a team of 50 scientists to do what the FDA had not: test the antibody tests. All but one test delivered so-called false-positives, meaning they mistakenly signaled antibodies in people who did not have them.

Coronavirus antibody testing is suddenly everywhere, but results are often incorrect or inconclusive. Patrick Hsu, an assistant professor of bioengineering at the University of California, Berkeley, was a senior author on a recent study on the accuracy of antibody tests. His group analyzed 14 tests and found only three produced consistently reliable results. "People want answers: Am I immune? Can I go back to work? Can I play soccer in the park?" Hsu says. "But the story's not quite so simple." He says that even for tests that can accurately detect the virus, many questions remain. For more on this, see our press release at Berkeley News

It's been pretty well publicized that an intensive study of proliferating COVID-19 antibody tests, co-led by assistant bioengineering professor Patrick Hsu of the Berkeley-UCSF Innovative Genomics Institute, has found that very few are effective and all have flaws, but that has not discouraged many eager buyers. "There are over 200 different antibody tests out there right at this point, more than we have for any other infectious disease," Professor Hsu says. "One of the things that we're able to do in our study is to test on individual blood samples both positive and negative, all of these tests against each other, head to head, right, in this bake-off, systematically." The tests returned too many false positives, and only one, called Sure Biotech, was found to be 100% accurate. "Some were over 10 percent, and some were even over 15 percent false positive, right? So that would really not be acceptable performance," he says. Link to video. For more on this study, see our press release at Berkeley News.