CURRENT ADVANCEMENTS ON THE EFFICACY OF CONVALESCENT PLASMA AS A POTENTIAL PROMISING TREATMENT FOR COVID-19

Purpose: No sooner had COVID-19 hit the world in December, 2019 in Wuhan, China, than the emergence of tremendous developments on the therapeutic interventions for the pandemic. No therapy has been proved successful up to date regardless potentiality of several intervention that are still in clinical trials. However Convalescent plasma demonstrated some sort of interest to be potential for the treatment of COVID-19 as we are still waiting for a specific therapy or vaccine. This review discusses current developments that supported the efficacy of convalescent plasma to attract its potentiality for treating COVID-19.

Methods: A systematic search with a search term “efficacy of convalescent plasma on COVID-19” was done on PubMed, Google Scholar, Science direct, Research Gate and clinicaltrials.gov database. A search was conducted based on all the literature discussing the current advancements on the use of convalescent plasma as a potential treatment for coronavirus, however only studies that discussed its efficacy were retrieved in this review.

Results: We retrieved a total of 24 articles discussing the current developments on the use of convalescent plasma as a potential treatment for COVID-19. 70% of the articles discuss its success, 20% of the articles evaluate current ongoing clinical trials for convalescent plasma while the remaining 10% present concerns on the inappropriate administration of convalescent plasma as a COVID-19 therapy.

Conclusion: Several discussed studies demonstrated much attention on the use of convalescent plasma as a potential promising therapy for COVID-19, although this has not been proven. However, other studies expressed concerns over the inappropriate administration of the therapy where COVID-19 patients ended up developing a pro- thrombotic disease.