During the 1918 flu pandemic, doctors encountered an outlook that was, in a way, very similar to what we have with the new coronavirus: a deadly disease, highly contagious, and for which there were no specific treatments. Some practitioners tried to treat their patients with blood serum from people who had overcome the disease and, in some cases, this solution worked.
The rationale for treatment is simple: to fight the disease, the patient’s immune system develops specific antibodies against the infectious agent. If we can safely extract them and inject them into people affected by the same disease, they could also attack the virus and help these people.
In China there are already several trials underway to test the effectiveness of this solution to attack SARS-CoV-2, but the results are still preliminary. The use of blood plasma (the fraction of blood that contains the antibodies, but does not include red blood cells) from convalescents has already been tested during the previous SARS epidemic and in Ebola outbreaks with modest results, and it is now necessary to see if in this case, it can work or, at least, serve as an emergency solution to prevent an increase in the number of serious cases that require admission to the ICU while the long-awaited vaccine is expected.
Clinical trials are needed to prove its effectiveness and safety
Last Tuesday, March 24, the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) issued a statement in which it emphasized that this therapy has not been shown to be effective in all the diseases studied , and that it is important to determine, through clinical trials , under what conditions is it safe and effective to do so.
But, in turn, the FDA recognized that we are in an extraordinary emergency situation and, for this reason, has authorized the use of these transfusions in critically ill patients. “Given the public health emergency presented by the expanding COVID-19 outbreak, while clinical trials are underway, the FDA is facilitating access to COVID-19 convalescent plasma for use in patients with severe or immediate infections who they threaten life ”.
A quick solution to save lives
“This is something that can be done very quickly, much faster than drug development, because it basically involves donating and transfusing plasma,” explains Jeffrey P. Henderson, associate professor of molecular medicine and microbiology at Washington University in St. Louis in a press release from that institution. This researcher is one of many who responded to the call of Arturo Casadevall, an immunologist at Johns Hopkins University who rose to fame recently for the publication of a column in The Wall Street Journal in which he talked about recovering this technique to treat patients affected by COVID-19. Thanks to his insistence, various clinical trials are being launched to test the effectiveness of transfusions for recovered patients.
Another advantage of this method is that the technology necessary to isolate donor plasma is already in the blood bank facilities. Once achieved, the next step is to detect the toxins and viruses it contains to separate them and achieve a plasma that can be safely transferred to sick or high-risk people. ” Receiving plasma from these donors is as safe as any other transfusion, ” Henderson explains.
“Since hospitals are overwhelmed, every patient we can keep out of the ICU is a huge logistical victory,” explains Michael Joyner, an anesthesiologist and physiologist at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, in an article published this week in Nature .
After the first clinical trials, the researchers hope that the use of this technique will spread to people at high risk of developing COVID-19, such as nurses and doctors, and thus help prevent the collapse of health services.
