The feasibility of convalescent plasma therapy in severe COVID-19 patients: a pilot study

Kai Duan; Bende Liu; Cesheng Li; Huajun Zhang; Ting Yu; Jieming Qu; Min Zhou; Li Chen; Shengli Meng; Yong Hu; Cheng Peng; Mingchao Yuan; Jinyan Huang; Zejun Wang; Jianhong Yu; Xiaoxiao Gao; Dan Wang; Xiaoqi Yu; Li Li; Jiayou Zhang; Xiao Wu; Bei Li; Yanping Yu; Wei Chen; Yan Peng; Yeqin Hu; Lianzhen Lin; Xuefei Liu; Shihe Huang; Zhijun Zhou; Lianghao Zhang; Yue Wang; Zhi Zhang; Kun Deng; Zhiwu Xia; Qin Gong; Wei Zhang; Xiaobei Zheng; Ying Liu; Huichuan Yang; Dongbo Zhou; Ding Yu; Jifeng Hou; Zhengli Shi; Saijuan Chen; Zhu Chen; Xin-xin Zhang; Xiaoming Yang

Convalescent plasma (CP) therapy, a classic adaptiveimmunotherapy, has been applied to the prevention and treatment of many infectious diseases for more than one century. Over the past two decades,CP therapy was successfully used in the treatment of SARS, MERS, and 2009 H1N1 pandemic with satisfactory efficacy and safety (9) (10) (11) (12) . A meta-analysis from 32 studies of SARS coronavirus infection and severe influenza showed a statistically significant reduction in the pooled odds of mortality following CP therapy, compared with placebo or no therapy (odds ratio, 0.25; 95% confidence interval, 0.14-0.45) (13) . However, the CP therapy was unable to significantly improve the survival in the Ebola virus disease, probably due to the absence of data of neutralizing antibodytitrationfor stratified analysis (14) . Since the virological and clinical characteristics share similarity among SARS, MERS, and COVID-19 (15) , CP therapy might be a promising treatment option for COVID-19 rescue (16) . Patients who have recovered from COVID-19 with a high neutralizing antibody titermay bea valuable donor source of CP. Nevertheless, the potential clinical benefit and risk of convalescent blood products in COVID-19 remains uncertain. Hence, we performed this pilot study in three participated hospitals to explore the feasibility of CPtreatment in 10 severe COVID-19 patients.