Binayak Das, Team Bioxone
A study conducted to unravel the potential of immunotherapy for patients affected by the covid-19 virus has announced that treatment with intravenous-immunoglobulin can potentially benefit covid-19 patients that are severely affected.
Intravenous immunoglobulin or IVIG is the collection of IgG obtained from the blood serum of a large number of healthy donors. It is one of the most widely sought-after immunotherapeutic molecules that has depicted the ability to cure autoimmune and inflammatory disorders to a large extent. The therapeutic advantage of IVIG over the use of powerful drugs and steroids in immunotherapies is that it targets multiple underlying mechanisms that are mutually non-exclusive. It even can target cellular mediators that are associated with immune response.
A cohort study reported the viability of IVIG as a treatment measure for severely affected COVID-19 individuals. The authors of that study administered IVIG to one half (174 patients) of the total pool (325) of affected individuals that were admitted to hospitals in southern China. They later inferred that the population that received IVIG early on (≤ 7 days after admission) and in high dosage (>15g per day) showed better prognosis than the ones that didn’t receive it.
The presence of limitations like varying duration of treatment and other parameters that varied with different hospitals rendered difficulty in extrapolating the full spectrum of this treatment. The authors mentioned that placebo-controlled clinical observations were extremely necessary for the successful evaluation of the IVIG treatment of COVID-19 treatment. And also said that a minimum of 2g kg-1 of dosage of IVIG would be necessary for conducting further clinical trials.
Although certain reports have claimed the administration of the combination of corticosteroids with IVIG to have resulted in a more progressive anti-inflammatory manifestation in critical patients, that would again make the individual contribution of IVIG to be unclear.
The authors stated that they are certain that better outcome was always observed amongst cases where IVIG treatment was coupled with steroids. And concluded by stating that further studies are deemed necessary for accurate knowledge on the effectivity and clarity in the viability of the use of IVIGs in immunotherapies aimed at treating individuals with the coronavirus-19 disease.
Also read: Multiple Antibody Panel to treat Esophageal Squamous Cell Carcinoma (ESCC)
Sources:
- Galeotti, Caroline, et al. “Intravenous Immunoglobulin Immunotherapy for Coronavirus Disease‐19 (COVID‐19).” Clinical & Translational Immunology, vol. 9, no. 10, Jan. 2020. DOI:10.1002/cti2.1198
- Shao, Z., Feng, Y., Zhong, L., Xie, Q., Lei, M., Liu, Z., Wang, C., Ji, J., Liu, H., Gu, Z., Hu, Z., Su, L., Wu, M., & Liu, Z. (2020). Clinical efficacy of intravenous immunoglobulin therapy in critically ill patients with COVID‐19: A multicenter retrospective cohort study. Clinical & Translational Immunology, 9(10). https://doi.org/10.1002/cti2.1192
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