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The treatment uses the blood sera from recovered COVID-19 patients to treat those who are critically ill or to boost immunity for those at high risk of contracting the disease. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved a clinical trial Friday that will allow Johns Hopkins University researchers to test a therapy for COVID-19 that uses plasma from recovering patients.
Arturo Casadevall, a Johns Hopkins infectious disease expert, proposed the use of convalescent plasma to treat critically ill COVID-19 patients and to boost the immune systems of health care providers and first responders. He assembled a team of physicians and scientists from around the United States to establish a network of hospitals and blood banks that can collect, isolate, and process blood plasma from COVID-19 survivors. "The ability to carry out a prophylaxis trial will tell us whether plasma is effective in protecting our health care workers and first responders from COVID-19," said Casadevall, a Bloomberg Distinguished Professor who holds joint appointments in the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine.
The strategy of isolating plasma is a long-established technology and recent advances make it as safe as a blood transfusion. The FDA's approval allows the team of researchers to begin testing the technique's effectiveness in boosting the immune systems of health care providers, first responders, and others at high risk of exposure to SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19....
