The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) will allow doctors across the country to begin using plasma donated by coronavirus survivors to treat patients who are critically ill with the virus.
The treatment called “convalescent plasma” essentially involves harvesting virus-fighting antibodies from the blood of previously infected COVID-19 patients.
“It is possible that convalescent plasma that contains antibodies to SARS-CoV-2 (the virus that causes COVID-19) might be effective against the infection,” the FDA said in a statement.
<< https://www.fda.gov/vaccines-blood-biologics/investigational-new-drug-ind-or-device-exemption-ide-process-cber/investigational-covid-19-convalescent-plasma-emergency-inds>>
Dr. Arturo Casadevall, chair of the Department of Molecular Microbiology and Immunology at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, said the treatment can be an effective stop-gap measure while waiting for the more sophisticated drugs and vaccine that can takes months to be made available to the public.
“When you recover from many viral diseases, you have in your blood what are called neutralizing antibodies. These are antibodies that kill the virus. Once you recover, the plasma can be taken from donors. It’s very safe,” Dr. Casadevall in an interview by Global Health NOW. “It’s the same thing as using a blood donation except they don’t take the red blood cells, they take the liquid. They take the plasma. It is itself a drug… it can be used for prevention of infection for people who are being exposed or it could be used for therapy for those who are sick.”
During the 2002 SARS outbreak, this treatment has been used and patients exhibited milder symptoms and shorter hospital stays. Dr. Casadevall said Chinese doctors bought 90 tons of plasma to Italy.
Dr. Casadevall said the US scientists will take it one step further by actually measuring the virus-killing antibody in people before they donate. They will only use the “highest activity plasma.”
