The promise, and problem, of plasma

Abstract

In April, Elliott Bennett-Guerrero began one of the country’s most advanced studies of one of the oldest weapons in the antiviral armamentarium. The anesthesiologist and intensive care unit doctor at Stony Brook Medicine in New York had been working with his hospital’s blood bank to start collecting convalescent plasma, the antibody-rich fraction of blood obtained from people who had recovered from COVID-19, the disease caused by the novel coronavirus SARS-CoV-2. The goal was simple: to figure out if giving convalescent plasma to people hospitalized with COVID-19 can keep them alive and off a ventilator. The need was urgent. “I have never seen such sick patients in my 25 years working in an ICU,” Bennett-Guerrero says. “It is really tragic.” In medical lingo, the word convalescent refers to a person undergoing recovery from an illness, and the crux of convalescent plasma is that if there is something in the blood that’s