Convalescent Plasma Trial for COVID-19 Patients Underway at NYU Langone

THURSDAY, May 21, 2020 (HealthDay News) -- Researchers at the NYU Grossman School of Medicine are conducting a phase II clinical trial to determine the efficacy of convalescent plasma in hospitalized patients with COVID-19. Corita R. Grudzen, M.D., vice chair for research in the Ronald O. Perelman Department of Emergency Medicine at NYU Langone Health, wrote the study protocol and recently spoke with HealthDay Live! about the trial.

"What we hope to see is that convalescent plasma used in this stage of disease prevents patients from dying, going on a mechanical ventilator," or being admitted to the intensive care unit, Grudzen said.

The controlled, randomized trial, which started April 17 and is also being led by researchers from Montefiore Health System and Albert Einstein College of Medicine, will enroll 300 hospitalized patients ages 18 years or older from seven hospital centers. The researchers are enrolling patients within three to seven days after symptom onset. While other studies across the country are focusing on sicker populations, Grudzen said the research team felt strongly about enrolling hospitalized patients. "We know the earlier, the better," she said. As an emergency physician, she said, "many of us were seeing hundreds and now thousands of patients hospitalized, and so we really wanted to focus on that group. We know historically [that] the antibody binds to the virus in some way to prevent it from either entering the cells or from destroying whomever it's attacking. And so, the idea is to do that before there's an onslaught of the body's own inflammatory response."

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