Evaluating the Quality of Studies Assessing COVID-19 Vaccine Neutralizing Antibody Immunogenicity

<b>Objective:</b> COVID-19 vaccine-neutralizing antibodies provide early data on potential vaccine effectiveness, but their usefulness depends on study reliability and reporting quality. <b>Methods:</b> We systematically evaluated 50 published post-vaccination neutralizing an...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Maeva Katzmarzyk, Robert Naughton, Ioannis Sitaras, Henning Jacobsen, Melissa M. Higdon, Maria Deloria Knoll
Format: Article
Language:English
Published: MDPI AG 2024-10-01
Series:Vaccines
Subjects:
Online Access:https://www.mdpi.com/2076-393X/12/11/1238
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
Description
Summary:<b>Objective:</b> COVID-19 vaccine-neutralizing antibodies provide early data on potential vaccine effectiveness, but their usefulness depends on study reliability and reporting quality. <b>Methods:</b> We systematically evaluated 50 published post-vaccination neutralizing antibody studies for key parameters that determine study and data quality regarding sample size, SARS-CoV-2 infection, vaccination regimen, sample collection period, demographic characterization, clinical characterization, experimental protocol, live virus and pseudo-virus details, assay standardization, and data reporting. Each category was scored from very high to low or unclear quality, with the lowest score determining the overall study quality score. <b>Results:</b> None of the studies attained an overall high or very high score, 8% (<i>n</i> = 4) attained moderate, 42% (<i>n</i> = 21) low, and 50% (<i>n</i> = 25) unclear. The categories with the fewest studies assessed as ≥ high quality were SARS-CoV-2 infection (42%), sample size (30%), and assay standardization (14%). Overall quality was similar over time. No association between journal impact factor and quality score was found. <b>Conclusions:</b> We found that reporting in neutralization studies is widely incomplete, limiting their usefulness for downstream analyses.
ISSN:2076-393X