Candidate: Plasma treatment
Type: Plasma from recovered COVID-19 patients
Status: The California Institute for Regenerative Medicine (CIRM), the state’s stem-cell agency, said April 24 it awarded $749,999 to John A. Zaia, MD, Director of the Center for Gene Therapy at City of Hope, to conduct a clinical study to administer blood plasma from recovered COVID-19 patients to treat those with the virus. The study will be CIRM’s first clinical study for COVID-19 after the agency approved $5 million in emergency funding in March. The funding will be awarded as part of an expedited approval process, CIRM said.
Zaia and colleagues at City of Hope will create the COVID-19 Coordination Program, designed to address solutions for collecting and screening plasma. The program will partner with medical teams at CIRM’s Alpha Stem Cell Clinic Network, as well as infectious disease, pulmonary and critical care teams from medical centers and community hospitals across California. Potential donors will be identified and screened for eligibility per established National and State blood banking safety requirements. The convalescent plasma will be collected from eligible donors and administered by licensed physicians to COVID-19 patients, who will be evaluated for response to the treatment and potential recovery.
COVID-19: 200 Candidates and Counting
To navigate through the >200 potential therapeutic and vaccine options for COVID-19, GEN has grouped the candidates into four broad categories based on their developmental and (where applicable) clinical progress:
● FRONT RUNNER – the most promising therapeutics/vaccines based on clinical progress, favorable data or both.
● DEFINITELY MAYBE – earlier phases with promising partners, or more advanced candidates in development that have generated uneven data.
● KEEPING AN EYE ON… – interesting technology, attracting notable partners, or both, but preliminary data.
● TOO SOON TO TELL – longshots pending additional experimental and/or clinical data.
GEN has also tagged the most common treatment types:
● ANTIVIRAL
● VAX
● ANTIBODY
● RNA
