Doctors push for treatment of coronavirus with blood from recovered patients
Source: NBC
... In a paper published Friday in the Journal of Clinical Investigation, Casadevall and a colleague, Dr. Liise-anne Pirofski, argued that collecting blood serum or plasma from previously infected people might be the best hope for treating severe cases of COVID-19, the disease caused by the virus, at least until a better treatment can be developed.
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Henderson said part of what makes the treatment attractive is its simplicity. Although there is danger in giving a patient the wrong type of blood, safety advancements over the past two decades have made adverse outcomes rare. And hospitals have the tools needed to begin harvesting and transfusing patients with blood serum right away, he said.
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Patients tend to make large numbers of antibodies against an infecting pathogen, and these antibodies often circulate in the blood of survivors for months or years afterward. By collecting and transfusing a survivor’s serum or plasma — the liquid portion of blood left once cells and platelets have been removed — doctors could potentially boost an ailing patient's immune response, Casadevall said.
Doctors in China have begun treating COVID-19 patients with plasma harvested from survivors and have reported somewhat positive results, especially when the method is applied early in the disease, though it has not been tested widely. “The usage of plasma will probably reduce the time needed to treat the disease from five to 10 days to three to five days,” said Dr. Zhang Wenhong, the leader of a medical team sent from Shanghai to Wuhan to help tackle the outbreak, in an interview with Al-Jazeera last week.
Casadevall argues that convalescent serum could also be given to front-line health care workers to help protect them from becoming ill.
Read more: https://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-care/doctors-push-treatment-coronavirus-blood-recovered-patients-n1158476
A bit of hope here. Saw a report on this out of China a couple of weeks ago, exciting to see this track underway in the US! Can’t happen soon enough.
The article points to the need to do broader testing to quickly find antibody-rich blood in our communities. Young folks would be a great source since they have stronger immune systems.
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