Hospitals are all set in ready to test a century-old treatment used to fight off flu and measles outbreaks in the days before vaccines came into the picture and this technique has not been applied on diseases like ebola and measles as well, can it just work for COVID-19 too?
Doctors in China have also attempted the first COVID-19 treatments using what the history books call “convalescent serum today, known as donated plasma from survivors of the new virus.
Now US hospitals have also thought of beginning large studies of the infusions both as a possible treatment for the sick and as vaccine-like temporary protection for people at high risk of infection.
It seems like we are “back to the Stone Age,” but there’s a good scientific reason to try using some survivors’ blood, said Dr Jeffrey Henderson of Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, who has also co-authored the FDA application with Casadevall and another colleague at the Mayo Clinic.
A person when getting infected with any virus their bodies make specific antibodies called proteins, the body starts making specially designed proteins called antibodies to fight the infection. After the person recovers, those antibodies float in survivors’ blood — specifically plasma, the liquid part of blood — for months, even years.
One of the planned studies would test if giving infusions of survivors’ antibody-rich plasma to newly ill COVID-19 patients would boost their own body’s attempts to fight off the virus.
To see if it works, researchers would measure if the treatment gave patients a better chance of living or reduced the need for breathing machines.
The method can also work like a vaccine. A vaccine trains people’s immune systems to make their own antibodies against a target germ. The plasma infusion approach would give people a temporary shot of someone else’s antibodies that are short-lived and require repeated doses, but the results might be temporary.
