UW Medicine, in partnership with Bloodworks Northwest, is seeking plasma donations from recovered COVID-19 patients.
“We are excited about moving forward in this time of a serious pandemic to develop a potential new therapy for this infection,” co-lead investigator Dr. Terry Gernsheimer said in a press release.
Gernsheimer, a professor of medicine specializing in hematology, along with Dr. Anna Wald, a professor of medicine, epidemiology and laboratory medicine, and Dr. Rebecca Haley, the medical director of the apheresis center at Bloodworks Northwest, will investigate the use of convalescent blood plasma for a process called passive immunization, or passive antibody therapy.
“When people recover from other infections, people make antibodies in response to the virus,” Wald said. “And those bodies can then be used therapeutically, to help somebody else who might not have a good immune response.”
This process has been used for well over a century, first against diphtheria in the 1890s and with later infections such as Ebola from 2014 to 2016. The Food and Drug Administration has since provided guidance to medical professions to apply this method to the current COVID-19 pandemic.
Although the treatment is still under investigation, the Journal of the American Medical Association reported last month that five COVID-19 patients in Shenzhen, China — all of which were ill enough to be placed on ventilators — began to recover a few days after receiving convalescent plasma treatment. Three of the five patients recovered enough to be discharged, while two remained in stable condition at the hospital.
Wald clarified that their investigation is meant to be a short-term therapeutic treatment for those who contract COVID-19. The treatment is a form of passive immunization, as opposed to longer-lasting active immunization, such as getting vaccinated.
“These antibodies are not around forever, but they stick around for a couple weeks” she said. “And we hope that that will bridge [a patient] until they can make their own immune responses to recover from the virus.”
Although the study does not focus on the demographics of recovered COVID-19 patients, researchers hope to analyze how such criteria aided their recovery.
“Eventually, we want to tie the donors’ characteristics with outcomes in patients who receive infusions of plasma,” Gernsheimer said in the press release. “This study protocol does not address that, but a longer-term project would.”
Ideal candidates for this study will first be screened by the UW Virology Research Clinic at Harborview Medical Center. An initial blood draw is used to determine the strength of their immunity response. If the response level is satisfactory, Bloodworks Northwest will contact volunteers for further testing.
Wald added that they are capping the volunteer’s age at 70. The process involves the movement of fluid in between the body’s major fluid compartments — intracellular, intravascular, or interstitial spaces — and requires people who can handle that.
Plasma collection is achieved through a process called plasmapheresis, where a medical instrument separates plasma from cells in blood. The remaining blood cells are returned to the donor, and the body will quickly replace the removed plasma proteins. Volunteers can donate up to every two weeks.
Volunteers must have had a confirmed COVID-19 diagnosis, which is determined by a nasal swab test.
“We’re asking people to wait several weeks from resolution of illness,” Wald said. “We want to make sure the person is no longer infectious.”
Already, her lab has received several calls from the Seattle community to be considered for the study.
“Most people are very grateful for the fact that they’ve recovered,” Wald said. “They feel they’ve gotten good care, and they want to sort of pay it forward.”
