If you survive COVID-19—and to date, 86,025 people have done so—it’s because your body wised up to the attack and learned to fight it off. (No pharmaceutical therapy seems to do much good, so for now your body is on its own, immunologically speaking.) Congratulations: You now produce antibodies to the coronavirus. And if you are willing to share them, you are now someone’s new best friend.
The process is simple. Surrender some of your blood, and a lab will filter out the cells and keep only the amber-colored serum, with the antibodies to the virus still in there and active. This serum, further refined, is called “hyperimmune globulin.” All that remains is to infuse the serum into a healthy person (or, in much greater quantities, into a sick one). The antibodies won’t last forever, but they could last weeks or months, and either help a sick recipient heal or keep a healthy recipient from getting the virus at all.
Yesterday, a team at Johns Hopkins University led by Arturo Casadevall received FDA approval to try this technique. “This has a high probability of working, based on 100 years of experience in medicine,” he says. Indeed, it was used successfully to treat Ebola in 2014.
The approach does carry risks. Antibodies to a virus can make a viral infection worse in some cases, such as with dengue fever. We don’t know if COVID-19 will react that way. (Most viruses do not.) Despite this, Casadevall says he has already had volunteers who wish to donate their antibodies or receive the serum from others. “This is real,” he says. “In eight weeks, we may have something that’s useful.”
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