In what seems to be a ray of hope in the Coronavirus Pandemic infected world and India, where the global COVID -19 positive cases stand at 2.76 million and are on the increase and in India at 23,452 and on the increase some good news trickled in today. In the current times, when our experts are still struggling to find a cure for this deadly disease, four patients at Delhi’s Lok Nayak Jai Prakash Narayan Hospital who underwent plasma therapy showed positive results.
India has recently given a go ahead to the framing of protocols to conduct clinical trials of Convalescent plasma therapy. Such trials have already been initiated in China and the USA. This therapy works like passive immunisation and is a preventive measure which must not be mistaken for a treatment or cure.
The basis of this therapy is to use the antibodies from the blood of those who have recovered from this disease and have the specific ability to fight the novel coronavirus and ingest it into a patient who is critically ill. It is based on the premise that the antibodies of the first recovered patient will start fighting the novel coronavirus in the second patient. This can also be used to immunise the high risk category of people who have not yet contacted the infection but stand a high risk of doing so , for example health care workers, family members and so on.
Dr SK Sarin, Director of the Institute of Liver and Biliary Science (ILBS) thanked the two donors, Sumiti Singh and Smruti Thakkar, for volunteering without hesitation to give their plasma to help cure the COVID-19 affected critically ill patients. He said that such clinical trials were being conducted in 5 more Indian states and this could also be scaled up to hundreds and thousands once it was confirmed that the results were beneficial and positive.
The Chief Minister of Delhi, Arvind Kejriwal appealed to all the recovered patients and who were healthy to come forward and donate their blood plasma which would go a long way in saving many lives.
