Can plasma from recovered COVID-19 patients treat the sick?
Since March 28, at least 11 patients critically ill with COVID-19 at hospitals in New York City and Houston became the first in the United States to receive a promising experimental treatment. But the therapy, newly authorized for emergency use by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, wasn’t concocted in a pharmaceutical laboratory. It came from the blood of other patients, those who have recovered from the coronavirus infection. The treatment is convalescent plasma, the liquid component of blood taken from someone who has survived an infection, in this case COVID-19. With the United States now leading the world in confirmed cases of the disease — and no proven treatments yet — researchers here are racing to set up clinical trials to test how effective convalescent plasma is against SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19. If the treatment is beneficial, that could lead to FDA approval for wider use. A vaccine against SARS-CoV-2 is at best more than year away (SN: 2/21/20)....