With a vaccine for COVID-19 still a long way from being realized, Johns Hopkins immunologist Arturo Casadevall is working to revive a century-old blood-derived treatment for use in the United States in hopes of slowing the spread of the disease.
With the right pieces in place, the treatment could be set up at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore within a matter of weeks, Casadevall says.
The technique uses antibodies from the blood plasma or serum of people who have recovered from COVID-19 infection to boost the immunity of newly infected patients and those at risk of contracting the disease. These antibodies contained in the blood's serum have the ability to bind to and neutralize SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19. Casadevall—a Bloomberg Distinguished Professor of molecular microbiology and immunology and infectious diseases at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and School of Medicine—published a paper on the proposal today in The Journal of Clinical Investigation.
"Deployment of this option requires no research or development," he says. "It could be deployed within a couple of weeks since it relies on standard blood-banking practices."
In this case, physicians would ask patients who recover from COVID-19 to donate their blood, from which sera would be isolated. After processing the serum and removing other toxins or trace illnesses, it can be injected into sick patients and those at risk of contracting the disease. The procedure for isolating serum or plasma is a long-established technology that can be performed using equipment normally found in hospitals and blood-banking facilities, and recent advances make it as safe as a blood transfusion, Casadevall says.
