In New York, Mount Sinai Hospital System has injected more than 20 very sick coronavirus patients with a "convalescent serum" based on the blood plasma of people who have recovered from the disease.
One of the first recovered patients to donate, Danny Riemer, 37, of New Rochelle, New York, said he and his wife feel "blessed" that they are now healthy and can volunteer their plasma to help others. "And despite the fact that we did have the virus, our thoughts are really with others, the people who are still fighting the virus, the people who have had much more serious cases than us," he said.
Convalescent plasma therapy, which involves collecting antibodies from the blood of recovered patients, is nothing new. It was used to treat the 1918 and 1957 flu epidemics, as well as SARS, H1N1 and Ebola and, most recently, some COVID-19 patients in China.
"While other tests measure whether the antibody is there or not, our assay can also measure how much of the antibody is there. And that's important, because we can identify those donors with a high amount of antibody who would most likely benefit the patients receiving this plasma."