Houston Methodist Hospital will be the first academic medical center in the country to transfuse donated plasma from a recovered COVID-19 patient to a critically-ill COVID-19 patient.
“What we did is transfused COVID-19 convalescent plasma to two critically ill patients,” said Dr. Eric Salazar, the principal investigator and a physician-scientist at Houston Methodist. “It’s plasma that’s been collected from donors that previously had COVID-19 and have successfully recovered,”
The idea is that the donated plasma may have lifesaving antibodies made by the immune system, which could help an individual fight off the disease, according to Dr. Jim Musser, the chair of the Pathology and Genomic Medicine at Houston Methodist.
