Elon Musk has asked 4,000 SpaceX workers to join a COVID-19 study. Here is what he learned.

When Covid-19 shut down the U.S. economy in March, Elon Musk had a rocket to launch.

The billionaire’s space exploration firm, SpaceX, planned to detonate a crewed spacecraft in the sky in May and wanted to stick to the schedule. This meant finding a way to keep facilities safe and open and limit the spread of Covid-19, a challenge when testing was scarce.

To monitor the prevalence of the virus among SpaceX workers across the country, Musk and the rocket company’s senior medical officer worked with doctors and university researchers to develop an antibody testing program. More than 4,000 SpaceX employees have volunteered for monthly blood tests.

This week, the group published its results, which suggest that a certain threshold of antibodies could provide people with lasting protection against the virus. Mr. Musk is listed as a co-author of the peer-reviewed study, which appears in the journal Nature Communications.

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“People can have antibodies, but that doesn’t mean they’re going to be immune” to Covid-19, said Galit Alter, co-author of the study who is a fellow of the Ragon Institute of MGH, MIT and Harvard. People who had fewer symptoms of milder Covid-19 generated fewer antibodies and were therefore less likely to reach the threshold of long-term immunity, according to the study.

The idea is one that other researchers are exploring as they and public health officials attempt to understand Covid-19 immunity.

“To really nail this down to the public health level, you would have to do reinfection studies and track people for reinfection” over time, said Joshua T. Schiffer, associate professor in the vaccines and infectious diseases division of Canada. Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center.

As vaccines slowly roll around the world, scientists who have studied SpaceX workers say their findings could be used to inform who is most vulnerable to the virus and should be vaccinated first. For example, those who don’t have antibodies in areas with high cases might be given priority, Dr Alter said.

Companies ranging from Google to Alphabet Inc. to Goldman Sachs Group Inc., Amazon.com Inc. and Tyson Foods Inc. offer Covid-19 diagnostic tests to get a snapshot of the infection. Few companies regularly test workers’ blood samples for antibodies.

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Representatives of Space Exploration Technologies Corp., the official name of the tightly-owned Southern California company, declined to comment on the tests.

Mr Musk, who is chief executive of SpaceX and Tesla Inc. and decried the stop orders, took a personal interest in the research and asked scientists to brief him and senior SpaceX executives during the pandemic on how antibodies and vaccines work, Dr. Dit Alter.

Mr Musk said in November that he had tested positive for the virus. “Mild sniffles and cough and mild fever the last few days,” he tweeted at the time.

Dr Alter, who studies immunology and molecular mechanisms for fighting disease with antibodies, created high-throughput Covid-19 antibody tests earlier this year. Her work has attracted investment from hedge fund manager Nancy Zimmerman, former Soros Fund Management CEO Mark Schwartz and his wife Lisa Schwartz, as well as numerous philanthropies (including the Musk Foundation) and government agencies. .

In April 2020, when Covid testing was scarce, SpaceX contacted Eric Nilles, an infectious disease expert at Harvard, and he called in Dr. Alter.

Together with SpaceX medical director Anil Menon, they built a testing program. SpaceX recruited workers from California to Florida who were ready to have their blood tested every month starting in April.

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Before the pandemic, Dr Menon had set up medical facilities at SpaceX work sites across the country. SpaceX has sent astronauts and aims to send civilians into orbit. He used some of these facilities to quickly expand blood collection stations and recruited medical interns from local hospitals to take samples.

In May, SpaceX successfully launched a test flight of its Dragon capsule in Florida carrying two astronauts.

In June, samples Dr Alter processed from local workers reported worsening cases in Texas. Instead of a typical virus positivity rate of 3%, 12% of the samples suggested infection. She re-launched them several times and confirmed they were correct, leading the company to send infected workers home and advise them to self-isolate.

Of the roughly 4,000 SpaceX workers tested multiple times, 300 have been infected with Covid-19. Researchers had enough data on 120 people to investigate their infections and subsequent antibody levels to draw any conclusions from the study.

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The median age of this small sample was 31, and 92% of them were men, which the authors say could skew their results as people of different ages and backgrounds show system responses. different immune systems. The study included test results between April and June.

“The good news is that most vaccines induce [antibody] “for people who are receiving both doses,” said Dr. Alter. So far, it’s pretty clear that we are reaching levels that are orders of magnitude higher with vaccination. “

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has said that having antibodies may provide some protection, but it is not known how long that may last. Researchers and diagnostic companies are struggling to understand what level of antibodies confers immunity.

“It would be great to have a clear number limit to say … above that level [of antibodies] you are protected, below you are not, but we do not have such a threshold right now, ”said Philip Dormitzer, head of viral vaccine research and development at Pfizer Inc.

SpaceX and its research partners continue to test each month and now monitor reinfection, especially as mutations spread, researchers involved in these efforts have said. So far, they have observed reinfection in workers who had low levels of Covid-19 antibodies in previous tests.

In November, the company launched four astronauts into orbit as part of its first operational mission with humans on board.

–Daniela Hernandez contributed to this article.