UW virology doctor says there’s potential for blood-based coronavirus treatment

As we wait for a coronavirus vaccine, blood plasma from recovered patients may help treat people who already have the illness. Dr. Keith Jerome from the University of Washington Virology department joined Seattle’s Morning News to explain what this process might look like.

“It could potentially work. There’s a number of people who are looking at this right now with some trials on this. … With a vaccine you get a shot in your arm and typically you try to make antibodies. So that’s this part of your immune system that’ll protect against the virus,” Jerome said.

“Well, you could make that with the vaccine, but someone who’s been infected has also made those. And that’s how the body has fought off this infection. They’ve got all these floating around their blood. Maybe we can take those, purify them, and give them to someone else who needs it. Similar approaches, for example, were used against Ebola.”

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Dr. Jerome said part of the key is finding enough people who have been infected, so you can gather enough antibodies. It’s a promising process, but it takes time.

“You got to find those people, there have to be enough of them. Of course, one infected person only has enough of these antibodies to help a couple of other people, so it’s hard to scale this,” he said. “One thing that we’re all thinking about is this response is not going to be done tomorrow. This is going to go on for weeks at best, and we’re thinking in our laboratory where we’re doing the testing for this, you know, let’s look at the supply chains.”

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“What happens a week from now, two weeks from now, a month from now? Will we still have all the reagents [chemicals needed to conduct the test] that we need? We know on a typical week almost exactly how much we go through. Suddenly, now we’re doing three times the testing that way. We have to make sure, go through this list of here’s 100 individual chemicals we need to do this test, and if one of them runs out, we’re in big trouble.”

Dr. Jerome said the lab is doing everything they can to make sure they meet the demand.

“Because right now, the people around the Seattle area, and really around the country, who are sending us samples from other parts of the country into Seattle for testing in our lab, they need us right now.”

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