Rebecca Pappas signed up to donate blood plasma full of powerful antibodies ready to fight the coronavirus. She caught COVID-19, she thinks, while studying in London back in March and recovered. She joined others who signed up to donate at the Red Cross in Fairfield.
“I know people are in need and they really need the blood right now,” she said. “I feel like it’s so important that, if you’ve gone through this, to make sure that you’re helping other people.”
“We’ve had some people in my town pass away and hopefully this might help someone else,” said Little Falls resident Jack Koch.
The Red Cross had just two of the rare Alyx machines that process plasma in New Jersey — in Princeton and Pennsauken. But it’s brought in three more in Fairfield and two others for a new donation site at University Hospital in Newark, plus extra technicians from Utah who flew in Sunday. They can now process about 300 plasma donations a week.
“Most of the people who have endured the virus and have come through on the other side are in the north part of the state,” said Red Cross Regional CEO Rosie Taravella. “People who are interested, we absolutely ask them to contact us. It may be another month before we can schedule you.”
“We have now a backlog of hundreds of people who want to donate,” said Dr. Shereef Elnahal, president and CEO of University Hospital. “There were hundreds more people than the New York Blood Center could take for a donation that we could handle up to that point as a hospital.”
So Elnahal says it partnered with the Red Cross. Convalescent plasma therapy has been a literal lifesaver for COVID-19 patients at University Hospital and other major hospitals across the country.
“These are people who’ve recovered from coronavirus, whose antibodies can be helpful, hopefully to folks who are really struggling with battling this disease,” he said.
University Hospital’s participating in a national FDA study of COVID-19 convalescent plasma — a therapy that’s worked for some flu strains and the measles. It’s treated 100 COVID-19 patients with plasma.
“The good news is that for many of the patients we treated — including those in the intensive care unit — a number of them have recovered and are now out of the hospital, so we really think this is promising. We hope the data will show this is an effective therapy,” Elnahal said. “We’re going to hopefully submit a manuscript soon, our physician scientists, for publication about the initial results.”
Elnahal won’t say what those results show, but also says the effort needs bigger studies with more randomized trials that compare folks who get a placebo to patients who get plasma.
“But the whole point is that we’re starting that process to prove the therapy, and we’re already seeing its benefit in some patients that we’ve treated,” he said.
The plasma collected from Pappas and others will help treat struggling COVID-19 patients across New Jersey, but it can also be frozen for up to a year. And with a second wave of infection predicted for the fall, that’s plasma gold in the bank.
