Coronavirus Treatment: Survivor Plasma Therapy Offers 'Overwhelmingly Positive' Results In Over 2600 Patients

Almost 2600 COVID-19 patients across hospitals and clinics in the U.S. have been treated with plasma from recovered patients without any major safety concerns, according to researchers who have been tracking the data.

“We have not seen any huge safety signals. The anecdotal evidence is overwhelmingly positive. As doctors, we're hopeful. As scientists, we have to be objective," Milwaukee Journal Sentinel quoted Michael J. Joyner, an anesthesiologist at the Mayo Clinic, who has been monitoring early results of the convalescent plasma therapy alongside setting up a clinical trial of the promising COVID-19 treatment.

The health experts who administered convalescent plasma therapy to these 2600 patients said that they are quite encouraged by the results observed nationally. “What we're hearing is that it does appear to be a very safe treatment,” Milwaukee Journal Sentinel quoted anesthesiologist William Hartman as saying.

Treating diseases using plasma from recovered patients goes back to more than a century and has been successfully implemented to treat measles, mumps, poliomyelitis as well as influenza. Convalescent plasma therapy has been demonstrated to be successful against a different type of coronavirus which caused severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) and good results were noted in a very small study conducted with just five COVID-19 patients in China.

How does plasma therapy work?

The idea is that the plasma from recovered patients would be enriched with antibodies that have helped them fight the virus. When given to a person currently fighting the coronavirus infection, the convalescent plasma therapy offers an immediate immune response rather than having to wait for their own immune system to get into action.

Although numerous clinical trials have been launched to test different medications and vaccines worldwide, none of them have been proven yet to prevent or inhibit COVID-19. The coronavirus which was first detected last year has infected over 3 million individuals throughout the world and has killed 208,000 including more than 56,000 people in the U.S.

The evidence that convalescent plasma therapy is safe and effective in treating COVID-19 patients does not come from a clinical trial but from those who have received it under the government’s expanded access program which is meant to help patients before clinical trials.

The Mayo Clinic and hospitals across the nation are asking recovered COVID-19 patients to donate their plasma to the Extended Access Program for convalescent plasma.