April 7, 2020

expert reaction to paper looking at the effectiveness of convalescent plasma therapy in severe COVID-19 patients

A paper, published in PNAS, reports on effectiveness of convalescent plasma therapy in severe COVID-19 patients

Prof Sir Munir Pirmohamed, President of the British Pharmacological Society, said:

“This paper reports the outcomes in 10 patients with severe COVID-19 who were treated with convalescent plasma.  The authors did compare the 10 cases with a concurrent control group and showed some encouraging results.

“However, the results must be treated with caution – this was not a randomised trial and all patients also received other treatments including antivirals such as remdesivir which are currently in trials for COVID-19.  It is also important to remember that there are potential safety concerns with convalescent plasma including transmission of other agents (including transmissible spongiform encephalopathy) and antibody enhancement of disease.

“Even if shown to work, scalability to treat large numbers of patients may become an issue.  As the authors indicate, there is a need for robustly designed randomised controlled trials to show efficacy of convalescent plasma.”

‘Effectiveness of convalescent plasma therapy in severe COVID-19 patients’ by Kai Duan et al. was published in PNAS on Monday 6 April 2020.

DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2004168117

All our previous output on COVID-19 can be seen at this weblink:

www.sciencemediacentre.org/tag/covid-19/

Declared interests

None received.