Sassoon doctors pull off Pune’s first nCoV plasma therapy recovery

PUNE: A 47-year-old woman has recovered from Covid-19 after undergoing convalescent plasma therapy at Sassoon hospital. This is the city’s first successful plasma therapy recovery.
“The patient underwent plasma transfusion twice. She tested negative for Covid-19 when her throat and nasal swab samples were analysed via a molecular (RT-PCR) test, 15 days after she was found positive,” said Sassoon General’s dean, Muralidhar Tambe.
The plasma donor is a patient who recovered from Covid-19 on May 6.
State health minister Rajesh Tope tweeted the development on Thursday. “The first attempt of plasma therapy on Covid-19 patient has proved successful at Sassoon hospital,” the minister wrote on Twitter.
Convalescent plasma therapy involves taking antibodies from the blood of a person who has recovered from Covid-19. The plasma is then injected into an active Covid-19 patient to help kickstart the immune response.
But convalescent plasma therapy is still an experimental procedure for Covid-19 patients. As per the Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR), hospitals and institutions planning to provide the treatment should do so using protocols that have been cleared by the Institutional Ethics Committee.
At this moment, the ICMR does not recommend the therapy as a treatment option.
The Union health ministry had also recently warned hospitals in the country against its use.
It said plasma therapy for the treatment of Covid-19 patients remains at an early experimental stage and has the potential to cause life-threatening complications.