A call to action to cure COVID-19

BOSTON — There’s a lot of work being done to develop a vaccine, but locally there’s hope in a more immediate treatment for coronavirus.

At UMass Memorial Medical center, doctors became patient.

“I actually decided to come to the ER, within 24 hours of my arrival I was actually intubated,” said Dr. Savant Mehta.

He went downhill fast.

“I was prepared, I was ready that I may not leave the hospital,” said Mehta.

So much so, he gave his wife passwords and important information thinking he might not make it out alive.

“At that point, they tried everything under the sun. Nothing was working – the blood pressure kept dropping,” said Mehta.

Then he became one of the first at UMass Memorial to be given convalescent plasma treatment.

Plasma extracted from the blood of patients who have beat the virus containing their coronavirus fighting antibodies. After the second dose, he describes a miraculous change.

“A few hours later they were amazed my oxygenation, blood pressure improved to the extent I probably could have left the unit the next day,” said Mehta.

Now UMass Memorial Hospital led by Dr. Jonathan Gerber and partnering with Johns Hopkins University is launching a new nationwide trial, building off that success.

“One is preventing infection from people that are exposed within a week of exposure,” said Gerber.

The other is early treatment for someone who was starting to show COVID-19 symptoms.

“This is almost universally true in medicine, the earlier you intervene in medicine – hopefully we can extinguish the fire before it does a lot of damage,” said Gerber.

Using the same convalescent plasma treatment that helped Mehta and over 150 other UMass memorial patients beat COVID and see if it can prevent patients with the virus from even having to check in to the hospital.

“I will tell you that from our experience watching this, there are a lot of stories just like Mehta that he shared, it’s either an extreme coincidence because after they got it…after a short period, we started to see improvement,” said Gerber.

Key to this trial, a placebo to run against.

Some patients will receive convalescent plasma from people who have recovered from COVID-19, others will get regular plasma.

The trial is seeking volunteers who find themselves in the early window of exposure to the virus or are experiencing early stages of symptoms.

Here is a link to learn more.

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