The New York Times :
A small but rigorous clinical trial in Argentina has found that blood plasma from recovered COVID-19 patients can keep older adults from getting seriously sick with the coronavirus – if they get the therapy within days of the onset of the illness.
The results, published Wednesday in the New England Journal of Medicine, are some of the first to conclusively point toward the oft-discussed treatment’s beneficial effects. They arrive nearly five months after the Food and Drug Administration, under pressure from President Donald Trump, issued the therapy an emergency green light for use in people hospitalised with COVID-19, reports The New York Times.
Thousands of patients have received infusions of plasma in the months since, while researchers waited for the data. The new study is one of the first well-designed clinical trials to show that the therapy has some benefit. “That’s kind of what we have been looking for, in terms of really having evidence,” said Dr Boghuma Kabisen Titanji, an infectious disease physician at Emory University who wasn’t involved in the research.
Convalescent plasma, the pale yellow liquid left over after blood is stripped of its red and white cells, teems with disease-fighting molecules called antibodies. Last summer, Trump hailed it as “a powerful therapy” made possible “by marshalling the full power of the federal government.”
But the FDA’s controversial stamp of approval, granted on Aug 23, was met with widespread criticism from researchers and health care professionals, many of whom decried the decision as political and lacking in scientific support.
At the time of the emergency authorisation, scant evidence pointed to the possibility that blood plasma might help people fight off the coronavirus. The treatment’s benefits also seemed largely limited to patients who received their infusions within three days of diagnosis and hadn’t yet experienced severe symptoms.
The new study, led by Dr Fernando Polack, a paediatric infectious disease physician and the scientific director of the INFANT Foundation in Argentina, appears to clarify the circumstances under which plasma has its perks.
A small but rigorous clinical trial in Argentina has found that blood plasma from recovered COVID-19 patients can keep older adults from getting seriously sick with the coronavirus – if they get the therapy within days of the onset of the illness.
The results, published Wednesday in the New England Journal of Medicine, are some of the first to conclusively point toward the oft-discussed treatment’s beneficial effects. They arrive nearly five months after the Food and Drug Administration, under pressure from President Donald Trump, issued the therapy an emergency green light for use in people hospitalised with COVID-19, reports The New York Times.
Thousands of patients have received infusions of plasma in the months since, while researchers waited for the data. The new study is one of the first well-designed clinical trials to show that the therapy has some benefit. “That’s kind of what we have been looking for, in terms of really having evidence,” said Dr Boghuma Kabisen Titanji, an infectious disease physician at Emory University who wasn’t involved in the research.
Convalescent plasma, the pale yellow liquid left over after blood is stripped of its red and white cells, teems with disease-fighting molecules called antibodies. Last summer, Trump hailed it as “a powerful therapy” made possible “by marshalling the full power of the federal government.”
But the FDA’s controversial stamp of approval, granted on Aug 23, was met with widespread criticism from researchers and health care professionals, many of whom decried the decision as political and lacking in scientific support.
At the time of the emergency authorisation, scant evidence pointed to the possibility that blood plasma might help people fight off the coronavirus. The treatment’s benefits also seemed largely limited to patients who received their infusions within three days of diagnosis and hadn’t yet experienced severe symptoms.
The new study, led by Dr Fernando Polack, a paediatric infectious disease physician and the scientific director of the INFANT Foundation in Argentina, appears to clarify the circumstances under which plasma has its perks.
