Plasma Therapy May Be Removed As Covid-19 Treatment Option After Trials Reveal No Significant Benefit To Patients

The Government is looking to remove the convalescent plasma therapy from the national guidelines for the treatment of COVID-19 as the clinical trials conducted by the Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR) have revealed that the therapy did not significantly benefit the patients, reports Livemint.

Sharing the development, ICMR's Director-General (DG) Dr Balram Bhargava said that the world's largest trial on plasma therapy has been conducted in India. The trial was conducted as a multi-centre study involving 464 patients.

The National Task Force, meanwhile, is also discussing whether remidesivir and hydroxychloroquine can also be removed from the clinical management guidelines, given a recently released pre-print of the World Health Organisation (WHO) Solidarity Trial showed that these did not help in the treatment of affected patients either. The WHO trial was an open-label trial involving 11,266 adults.