Donated plasma from Covid-19 survivors is of no benefit for hospital patients, study finds

‘This is why we do randomised trials’ says researcher as latest study dashes hope for treatment

NHS Blood and Transplant has encouraged Covid survivors to donate their blood plasma for use in patients (PA)

Using donated blood plasma from Coronavirus survivors does not help treat patients sick in hospital, according to a clinical trial involving 11,500 NHS patients.

Following the results, hospitals have been told today that they should not use so-called convalescent plasma from Covid-19 patients.

It was thought plasma taken from surviving Covid patients would have antibodies against the Covid-19 virus and that this would help fight the infection in other patients.

NHS Blood and Transplant has launched regular appeals for survivors to donate their plasma but the new research has found it has no value.

Professor Martin Landray, from the University of Oxford and joint chief investigator for the research said on Twitter: “Huge numbers of patients around the world have received convalescent plasma in the hope that it would improve clinical outcomes.

“For hospitalised patients it is now clear that that hope does not translate into reality This is why we do randomised trials - to know rather than guess.”

The study was part of the landmark, Randomised Evaluation of Covid-19 Therapy, or RECOVERY trial, which has been instrumental in discovering treatments against Covid-19.

Read more:

• AstraZeneca is safe, Hancock insists - follow Covid news live
• Two cases of new Philippines Covid variant found in England 
• Lockdown roadmap dates: What is reopening and when?

It helped discover the beneficial effects of dexamethasone, a cheap steroid, which cuts deaths by up to a third in the most seriously ill patients. It has also supported the use of Tocilizumab which also reduced deaths and shortened patients stay in hospital.

In its latest findings, between 28 May and 15 January 11,500 patients were randomly allocated to two groups, one to receive convalescent plasma and the other to get standard care.

It found there was no significant difference in 28-day mortality between the two groups, with both seeing 24 per cent of patients dying within 28 days.

Using plasma also had no impact on the proportion on patients discharged from hospital within 28 days, nor did it have an impact on preventing patients needing ventilators.

An alert to NHS hospitals, sent on Wednesday, told them to make sure frontline doctors knew about the findings and did not use the plasma to treat Covid patients.

The RECOVERY trial is the world’s largest clinical trial for Covid-19 treatments and has now expanded internationally with Indonesia and Nepal among the first countries to join.

Peter Horby, professor of emerging infectious diseases and global health at the University of Oxford, and chair of the government’s New and Emerging Respiratory Virus Threats Advisory Group, or NERVTAG, said: “The RECOVERY trial has been an enormous success, enrolling over 36,000 patients and delivering clear results on six treatments already. By building on this success through international partnership we can speed up the assessment of novel treatments, increase the global relevance of the trial results, build capacity, and reduce wasted efforts on small uninformative studies.’

“It is particularly important to find readily available and affordable treatments for Covid-19 that can be used worldwide. RECOVERY International will help us to identify effective treatments that can be used in less well-resourced settings’ he added.