Coronavirus: Was plasma therapy for coronavirus treatment ever a viable solution?

The panic and chaos witnessed during the second wave of coronavirus will always haunt us.

While many succumbed to the virus, those who survived continue to bear the long term impact of the virus. Some are still grieving, others trying to overcome the losses.

At a time, when the entire country was battling the implications of the SARs-COV-2 virus, the medical team on the other hand was looking for ways to accommodate patients and also scavenging for possible treatments.

In light of such unprecedented challenges, many experts and doctors resorted to convalescent plasma therapy to treat COVID-19 patients and even vouched for its efficacy, even when there was no strong evidence to prove the same.

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When a person becomes sick with an illness, he or she develops antibodies against the infection. These virus-fighting antibodies float in their blood plasma, which is a light amber liquid component of blood that suspends blood cells.

In convalescent plasma therapy, doctors extract the plasma from a recovered patient's body, run tests to ensure it is safe and then isolate the antibodies to use it to treat other patients suffering from the same illness.

The COVID-19 outbreak has called for new, experimental treatments including the plasma therapy, which uses the plasma from a recovered COVID-19 patient to treat other patients.

Earlier, the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) had given emergency use authorization for convalescent plasma therapy to treat COVID-19 patients. It was believed that the treatment could help hospitalized patients and those suffering from severe illness.

However, given the lack of evidence to suggest effectiveness of such procedure, Anthony Stephen Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and the Chief Medical Advisor to the US President, and the director of the National Institutes of Health, Francis S. Collins discouraged the FDA from allowing convalescent plasma therapy as a form of COVID-19 treatment.

Most recently, the World Health Organization (WHO) updated its living guideline on COVID-19 therapeutics. While the global health agency recommends against the use of plasma therapy for non-severe COVID patients, it says that it can be used within clinical trials for severe and critical COVID-19 patients.

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During the second wave, plasma therapy became the talk of the town, a ray of hope for many. While it was believed to benefit COVID patients in many ways, the unavailability of data made it seem very dubious.

That said, to determine the efficacy of the therapy, the Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR) conducted India's largest trial spanning across 39 hospitals, including 464 hospitalised patients with 'moderate' symptoms who received convalescent plasma therapy.

Of the total number of participants, 235 patients received the plasma along with the “best standard of care” called the intervention arm, while the other 229 patients received only the “standard of care” and no plasma. It was found that there was no notable difference between the number of people who did not progress to severe illness, nor was there any indication of lower mortality rate.

“Thirty-four patients (13.6%) died in the intervention arm and 31 (14.6%) in the control arm,” the study reported.

“CP was not associated with reduction in mortality or progression to severe COVID-19. This trial has high generalisability and approximates real-life settings of CP therapy in settings with limited laboratory capacity,” the researchers further added.

The second COVID wave left everyone unhinged. The shortage of hospital beds, lack of medical equipment and oxygen supplies, all lead to a frantic rush.

These unprecedented times lead to a rise in the demands for new, alternative treatments and drugs for COVID-19 patients. People did not care about how expensive they were or whether or not they were clinically tried or approven.

So was the case with convalescent plasma therapy. Even with the lack of evidence to suggest it's safety and efficacy, people gave up large sums of money to receive the treatment, without any guarantee of positive outcome.