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Blood Plasma From Survivors Will Be Given to Coronavirus Patients:
Can blood from coronavirus survivors help other people fight the illness? Doctors in New York will soon be testing the idea in hospitalized patients who are seriously ill.
Blood from people who have recovered can be a rich source of antibodies, proteins made by the immune system to attack the virus. The part of the blood that contains antibodies, so-called convalescent plasma, has been used for decades to treat infectious diseases, including Ebola and influenza.
"It's kind of difficult scientifically to know how valuable it is in any disease until you try," said Dr. David L. Reich, president and chief operating officer of the Mount Sinai Hospital, which will be using the treatment. "It's not exactly a shot in the dark, but it's not tried and true."
Dr. Reich said it would be tried as a treatment for hospitalized patients who had a moderate form of the disease and had trouble breathing, but not for those who are in advanced stages of the disease.
"The idea is to get to the right patients at the right time," he said. "But it's experimental."
Researchers at Mount Sinai were among the first in the United States to develop a test that can detect antibodies in recovering patients, an essential part of this treatment strategy.
On Tuesday, the Food and Drug Administration gave permission for the plasma to be used experimentally on an emergency basis to treat coronavirus patients, and hospitals in New York quickly began asking to participate, said Dr. Bruce Sachais, chief medical officer of the New York Blood Center, which will collect, test and distribute the plasma.
"Our main focus is, how do we implement this quickly to help the hospitals get product to their patients," Dr. Sachais said. "We have blood centers in New England, Delaware and the Midwest, so we can do the same thing in other regions. We're working with other blood centers and hospitals that may collect their own blood and want to do this. We may not be able to collect enough plasma in New York to help the entire country, so we want to share with other centers to help them."
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 30 2020, @02:32PM
There's not really any point to that, the risks associated with plasma infusions are well established. The only real question here is whether or not it works and they're not going to stop providing other treatment while this is going on. The results will likely have to be inductive, which means that we won't know for sure that this is what helped, but they'll likely compare it against what the success rates were for the other treatments and as long as that's somewhat below, they'll call it good enough for now.
Medical research during a pandemic on people that are already infected is a massive problem ethically as you can't do any of the things you'd normally want to do in terms of research design due to the ethics of withholding treatment and the inherent pressure on the patients to agree to anything that might help.