Convalescent plasma therapy effective in 76% COVID-19 patients, finds study

Convalescent plasma therapy is safe and improves outcome in three out of four COVID-19 patients, finds a new study

A new trial on convalescent plasma therapy found that convalescent plasma is a safe treatment option for patients with severe COVID-19 disease. Convalescent plasma therapy uses plasma  donated by recovered patients of COVID-19 to introduce antibodies in those under treatment. These antibodies are highly specific to the invading pathogen and work to eliminate the novel coronavirus from the patient’s body.

Results of this peer-reviewed trial showed that 19 out of 25 patients improved with the treatment and 11 were discharged from the hospital. There were no serious adverse side effects caused by the plasma transfusion and findings were published in the American Journal of Pathology. 

“While physician scientists around the world scrambled to test new drugs and treatments against the COVID-19 virus, convalescent serum therapy emerged as potentially one of the most promising strategies,” said James M. Musser, M.D., Ph.D., chair of the Department of Pathology and Genomic Medicine at Houston Methodist and the corresponding author on the study. “With no proven treatments or cures for COVID-19 patients, now was the time in our history to move ahead rapidly.”

Patients were treated under emergency use guidelines (eIND) from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration and then received approval from the FDA to open up the trial to more patients as an investigational new drug (IND). 

this trial revealed patient outcomes following plasma therapy were very similar to recently published results of patients treated on a compassionate-use basis with the antiviral drug remdesivir

Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR) is also conducting a multicentric phase-2 trial using convalescent plasma on COVID-19 patients with moderate illness after three feasibility studies in about 20 severely ill patients found the therapy to be safe and able to resolve illness or improve the clinical symptoms. The trial will involve 452 patients in 21 hospitals with moderate COVID-19 illness. Half of the patients will be randomly assigned to receive convalescent plasma (226 participants) and the other half will receive standard care (control group). 

Convalescent plasma therapy has been tried in many viral diseases, like the 1918 Spanish Flu and more recently it was used with some success during the 2003 SARS pandemic and the 2009 influenza H1N1 pandemic. But a recent study of plasma therapy conducted in Guinea under the guidance of WHO with 84 Ebola-infected patients did not show any significant improvement in survival during the 2015 Ebola outbreak in Africa. 

Additional findings during this trial revealed patient outcomes following plasma therapy were very similar to recently published results of patients treated on a compassionate-use basis with the antiviral drug remdesivir. The research team also concluded that any observed complications were consistent with findings reported for COVID-19 disease progression and did not result from the plasma transfusions. 

Researchers are considering a randomized controlled trial to look more closely at variables such as timing of the transfusion after the onset of symptoms, the number and volume of transfusions adjusted for patient biometrics, antibody levels in donor plasma and numerous other parameters needed to effectively evaluate how to optimize this therapy.