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Plasma From Coronavirus Survivors Could Treat Current Patients
A 100-year approach shows promise for Covid-19
In 1890, Emil von Behring and Shibasaburo Kitasato published a landmark study showing that they could cure guinea pigs infected with diphtheria. To do it, the scientists injected the guinea pigs with serum taken from animals that were immune to the disease. At the time, diphtheria was a leading cause of death among children.
Behring and Kitasato immediately realized its application for human diseases and called it “serum therapy.” The discovery led to the first successful diphtheria treatment and, eventually, a vaccine. Doctors later used it during the 1918 Spanish flu pandemic, and in many cases, it helped patients recover. Now, the idea is being revived to treat people who are newly infected with the novel coronavirus.
Serum, or plasma, is the clear, yellowish liquid component of the blood. Scientists think it could be an effective treatment for patients hospitalized with Covid-19 or those exposed to the virus who are at high risk of getting sick, like health care workers and people with weak immune systems.
Plasma from recovered patients, also known as convalescent plasma, bolsters the immune system against other pathogens because it contains powerful antibodies. “When people get sick with a virus or bacteria, they recover from the illness because their body produces antibodies specifically to fight that bug,” Michael Joyner, MD, an anesthesiologist and physiologist at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, tells Elemental.
Vaccines also spur the body into producing these protective antibodies. But there is no Covid-19 vaccine yet, so plasma from recovered patients remains doctors’ best source of antibodies for now.
Joyner is part of the Covid-19 Convalescent Plasma Project, a group of scientists and doctors who came together after Arturo Casadevall, MD, PhD, the chair of molecular microbiology and immunology at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, championed the idea in a Wall Street Journal editorial at the end of February.
“The goal with this is to give the people on the front lines a tool that can help relieve the…
