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Among the myriad clinical trials for vaccines to prevent COVID-19 and drugs to treat infections, doctors are looking to survivors’ plasma for a possible therapy. The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) released a statement on Tuesday (March 24) stating that investigators can request to use plasma from COVID-19 survivors to deliver antibodies to seriously ill patients, under an emergency investigational new drug (IND) protocol.
Convalescent plasma treatment, as it is known, has roots stretching back over 100 years. It is based on the premise that because a survivor developed antibodies throughout the course of their own infection, blood donations to those who became recently ill would give the recipients’ immune systems a leg up, reducing the severity of the disease and increasing the likelihood of survival. During the 1918 Spanish flu pandemic, the rate of mortality decreased by as much as 50 percent among the ...
