The rapid scale-up of research on coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) has spawned a large number of potential vaccines and immunotherapies, accompanied by a commensurately large number of in vitro assays and in vivo models to measure their effectiveness. These assays broadly have the same end-goal — to predict the clinical efficacy of prophylactic and therapeutic interventions in humans. However, the apparent potency of different interventions can vary considerably between assays and animal models, leading to very different predictions of clinical efficacy. Complete harmonization of experimental methods may be intractable at the current pace of research. However, here we analyse a selection of existing assays for measuring antibody-mediated virus neutralization and animal models of infection with severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) and provide a framework for comparing results between studies and reconciling observed differences in the effects of interventions. Finally, we propose how we might optimize these assays for better comparison of results from in vitro and animal studies to accelerate progress.

对 2019 年冠状病毒病 (COVID-19) 的研究迅速扩大，催生了大量潜在的疫苗和免疫疗法，同时也有相应大量的体外测定和体内模型来衡量其有效性。这些测定大致具有相同的最终目标——预测人类预防和治疗干预的临床功效。然而，不同干预措施的明显效力在检测和动物模型之间可能存在很大差异，导致临床疗效的预测截然不同。以目前的研究速度，实验方法的完全统一可能很困难。然而，在这里，我们分析了一系列用于测量抗体介导的病毒中和作用的现有测定方法和严重急性呼吸综合征冠状病毒 2 (SARS-CoV-2) 感染的动物模型，并提供了一个框架来比较研究之间的结果并协调观察到的差异干预措施的效果。最后，我们提出了如何优化这些检测方法，以便更好地比较体外和动物研究的结果，从而加速进展。