hankyoreh

Medical workers at Keimyung University Dongsan Medical Center in Daegu prepare to treat COVID-19 patients on Apr. 7. (Yonhap News)

On Apr. 7, South Korea reported its first successful case of a COVID-19 patient in critical condition being treated with convalescent plasma. The country’s disease control authorities will soon be releasing a finalized version of guidelines for convalescent plasma therapy. Though no treatment has been developed for the coronavirus so far, plasma therapy is quickly becoming a leading candidate.

In a paper published in the Journal of Korean Medical Science, an international academic journal, on Apr. 6, a team of researchers led by Choi Jun-yong and Kim Sin-young, both professors at Yonsei University’s Severance Hospital, found that convalescent plasma therapy aided considerably in the recovery of two patients exhibiting symptoms of severe pneumonia and acute respiratory distress syndrome.

Plasma therapy is one of the methods used to treat patients when no standard treatments or vaccines are available. It takes advantage of the fact that antibodies form in the plasma of people who’ve recovered from the disease in question. This was also used to treat patients with Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS) during an outbreak in South Korea in 2015.

When two COVID-19 patients at Severance Hospital (a 71-year-old man and a 67-year-old woman) continued to suffer from pneumonia and respiratory distress even after being treated with antivirals such as Kaletra and hydroxychloroquine (which have been used with other patients), they were administered two rounds of convalescent plasma, at an interval of 12 hours.

Both patients’ condition improved following the treatment, with viral loads and respiratory distress decreasing. Choi Jun-yong, the physician responsible for the two patients, reported that a number of clinical indicators, including inflammatory markers and lymphocyte count, both improved after convalescent plasma and steroids were administered. Doctors later found that the patients had made a full recovery.

“We’ve been developing the guidelines for plasma therapy for COVID-19 with reference to the guidelines used during the MERS outbreak and are currently in the final stage, which is an expert review. Given the lack of a standard medication or vaccine, the important thing is to lower the fatality rate for critically ill patients. Following the [experts’] review, therefore, we’ll be quickly gearing up to launch a program for acquiring usable plasma and administering it to patients,” said Kwon Jun-wook, deputy director of South Korea’s Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (KCDC), during the daily briefing on Tuesday.

Interest has been surging in plasma therapy and other potential ways to treat the coronavirus. One medication that researchers have recently found effective is Ivermectin, an anti-parasitic drug developed by Merck, an American pharmaceutical firm.

On Apr. 3, Science Daily reported that Ivermectin had stopped the growth of a culture of COVID-19, killing the virus within 48 hours in an experiment by a collaborative research team from the Monash Biomedicine Discovery Institute and the Peter Doherty Institute of Infection and Immunity, in Australia. But as of Monday, disease control authorities remained cautious, noting that the therapy’s effectiveness had been shown at the cellular level, but not the human level, and that its safety and efficacy had yet to be established.

Another potential treatment for COVID-19 is Remdesivir, an Ebola drug developed by Gilead Sciences, an American pharmaceutical company. On Mar. 23, South Korea’s Central Clinical Committee for Novel Infectious Diseases (chaired by Oh Myoung-don, professor of infectious disease at Seoul National University) said that Remdesivir has had the best results of all the potential medications undergoing clinical testing in the country. And in January, there was a case of an American coronavirus patient getting better just one day after being treated with Remdesivir.

HIV drug Kaletra is another frequently mentioned option for treating COVID-19. That drug inhibits a protease (an enzyme that breaks down proteins) that’s necessary for the coronavirus’s proliferation.

Experts agree that it’s not smart to jump to any conclusions about the efficacy of potential therapies. “Vaccines and medications have not only positive effects but also negative ones, including toxicity. It’s unclear whether two years of clinical experiments will be enough to demonstrate safety and efficacy,” said Kim Chang-yeop, a professor at Seoul National University’s Graduate School of Public Health.

By Kwon Ji-dam, Park Jun-yong, and Park Da-hae, staff reporters

Please direct comments or questions to [english@hani.co.kr]