Testing an Old Therapy Against a New Disease: Convalescent Plasma for COVID-19

As deaths from coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) continue to mount, desperation has driven physicians to try therapies backed by little or no evidence.

Perhaps the greatest excitement surrounds convalescent plasma, a treatment more than a century old that has gone in and out of fashion—in when infectious disease outbreaks occurred and then out when treatments and vaccines that could be mass-produced were developed to contain them.

Taken from healthy people (or in the earliest reported cases, animals) who have recovered from the infectious disease of interest, antibody-rich convalescent plasma is thought to give recipients’ immune systems a running start.