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02:55
A major new trial has been launched in the United Kingdom to assess whether the blood plasma of COVID-19 survivors could help treat those with serious illnesses.
“This is absolutely groundbreaking,” said Mike Murphy, a spokesperson for NHS Blood and Transplant, which leads the blood plasma donation program on behalf of the government.
“A randomized trial demonstrating the safety and efficacy of convalescent plasma has never been published. Not only in COVID but in any infectious disease. In others, such as Ebola and avian influenza, when we collected enough plasma, the pandemic had ended as well there was no opportunity to test, “he said.
More than 6,500 people registered their interest in the clinical trial to see if plasma transfusions can save lives and shorten stays in intensive care.
Donors should have tested positive for the disease, either at home or in the hospital, but now they should spend a good few weeks in their recovery, ideally 28 days.
“We are using standard blood donor criteria, those ages 17 to 65 and 65-70 for people who are existing donors. It only takes 45 minutes, it is safe and easy and we are obviously encouraging as many people as possible to collect plasma.” Mr. Murphy said.
The first donations in the UK were collected through a process called plasmapheresis: the blood of COVID-19 survivors is filtered to remove antibody-rich plasma that recognizes the virus and prevents it from attacking healthy cells.
More than 6,500 people have registered their interest in the UK blood plasma assay.
More than 6,500 people have registered their interest in the UK blood plasma assay.
The first transfusions will take place in the coming weeks.
“We plan to use it in a very large randomized trial where patients with COVID-19 in the ICU will receive plasma or non-plasma. This is a large trial that we will recruit very quickly and hope to obtain results regarding its effectiveness and safety within 2 months” Murphy said.
The hope is that injecting plasma into infected people will boost their immune systems with a vital dose of antibodies.
It is a treatment that has been around for a century, used for the first time in the 1918 Spanish flu pandemic.
Infusions of blood plasma were also used to combat SARS and MERS, two similar coronaviruses, as well as the deadly Ebola infection.
And COVID-19 patients in some parts of China are already being treated by this method. But Mike Murphy says this judgment is on a different level.
“We don’t know if it is effective: the trials that were done before were not randomized trials, they had a very small number of patients, other treatments were often given at the same time and therefore the trials, the studies that have been done , effectiveness and safety could not be demonstrated.
“With this pandemic, we have the opportunity to do it on a large scale, with well-designed randomized control trials that this time we will really get a response that we haven’t had before,” he said.
Like a new infection, the race is across the globe to find a cure for the killer virus, but that takes a lot of time and money to go through testing and regulation before mass production.
This therapy is available immediately and is only based on drawing blood from a recovered patient. If it works, it could be expanded nationally to treat 5,000 patients per week.
