COVID-19 Description: What is Convalescent Plasma Therapy? How effective is it against the new coronavirus?

The Indian Medical Research Council, the apex institution of medical research in India, invites institutions to participate in clinical trials of convalescent plasma therapy. The purpose is to study the safety and efficacy of said therapies in the treatment of COVID-19 patients. This treatment is reported to have shown promising results in China. It is the epicenter of the outbreak of the new coronavirus that has infected nearly 20 people worldwide.

What is Convalescent Plasma Therapy?

The idea behind convalescent plasma therapy is that such immunity can be transferred from healthy people to sick people using plasma. Convalescent plasma is the liquid portion of the collected COVID-19 patient’s blood. Therefore, this treatment used the recovered patient’s blood rich in antibodies to treat other sick people.

According to Neha Gupta, an infectious disease consultant at the Fortis Memorial Institute in Gurugram, people with asymptomatic or mild symptoms develop early immunity. In contrast, it later develops in severe and critically ill COVID 19 patients.

When was this idea invented?

The concept of this cure goes back to 1890, more than a century ago. German physiologist Emil von Behring has discovered that serum obtained from rabbits infected with diphtheria is effective in preventing diphtheria infection. Bering received the first Nobel Prize in Medicine in 1901.

Similar treatments have been attempted during several outbreaks in the past, including the 1918 Spanish influenza pandemic, the 1920s diphtheria outbreak, and the 1930s outbreak of carnivorous bacteria. At that time, conservative serum therapy was ineffective and had considerable side effects. It took years before the antibody fraction could be separated. Still, unintended antibodies and impurities caused side effects.

Most recently, different effects have been tested with Ebola and various coronavirus diseases such as SARS in 2003 and MERS in 2012. With improved extraction and screening techniques, this method is much safer and more effective than ever.

How does it work?

This procedure will draw blood from a person who has recovered from COVID-19 disease. Serum is separated and screened for virus neutralizing antibodies. Antibody-rich serum is given to patients with severe symptoms of COVID-19.

According to the Houston Methodist, the process of donating plasma is the same as donating blood and takes about an hour. Houston Methodist became the first academic medical center in the United States to transfuse plasma from donated COVID-19 patients to critically ill patients.

The plasma donor is connected to a small device that removes plasma and returns red blood cells to the body at the same time. It said that plasma can be donated more often, twice a week, unlike normal blood donations, where the donor has to wait for red blood cells to replenish during donation.

This therapy is not easy to use, mainly because it is difficult to obtain large amounts of plasma from survivors. With diseases like COVID-19, most patients with severe symptoms are older and often suffer from other medical conditions such as hypertension and diabetes, so their effectiveness remains questionable.

How effective is it?

Before, Research In China, the number of samples was small, but it proved to be an effective treatment for patients with coronavirus. In this study, 10 adult COVID-19 patients with severe symptoms were given 200 ml convalescent plasma. Patients witnessed a significant improvement with reported viral clearance among seven patients without serious side effects.

With this treatment, the sick person gets only temporary passive immunity. It lasts only as long as the injected antibody remains in the bloodstream, usually less than a week. On the other hand, if a vaccine were developed, it could provide lifelong immunity to the pathogen.

The good news is that three severe COVID-19 Indo-American patients in Houston are also showing signs of recovery after transfusing plasma from recovered patients.

Based on previous experience with respiratory viruses and data from China, the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) could reduce the severity of COVID-19-induced or shorten the length of the disease There is a nature.

The Indian Medical Research Council (ICMR) has approved plasma therapy in Kerala. Kerala is the first state to be allowed to try this out in the country because the Task Force was already in place. So far, ICMR is not recommended as a non-clinical treatment option.

Worldwide, nearly 5 lakh positive cases have been fully recovered. Therefore, if the treatment proves to be effective, it could potentially provide a sufficient amount of antibody to critically ill patients.

The world is waiting for a breath-holding vaccine against COVID-19, so it’s still unclear if this method can provide the much needed shortcut to find a cure.

(Uses inputs from IANS and India Science Wire)