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.

He added, "We have had discussions at the National Task Force and we are discussing further with the joint monitoring group. This may be deleted from the national guidelines. That is the discussion ongoing and, more or less, we are reaching towards it."

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.