Giving the blood of Ebola survivors to patients didn't seem to make a difference, doctors found in the biggest study so far on the approach, prompting some scientists to say it's time to abandon the strategy.
With no licensed
treatment for the devastating disease, doctors have sometimes used blood from
survivors to treat the sick, hoping its infection-fighting antibodies might
help patients defeat the virus. It seemed to help some patients in the past but
there was no clear proof. Amid the world's biggest outbreak of Ebola in West
Africa in 2014, scientists decided to put the treatment to the test in Guinea.
At a clinic in
the capital Conakry, scientists found no difference in survival between 84
patients who got survivor blood compared to about 400 patients treated some
five months earlier, according to the study published in New England Journal of
Medicine Thursday.
"We would
have liked to have seen more dramatic results," said Johan van Griensven
of the study in Guinea, the paper's lead author. "But this doesn't mean
(blood) plasma treatment doesn't work by definition."
He said antibody
levels are often low in patients who have only recently recovered from Ebola
and that doctors might need to use blood from long-term survivors to get a
better effect.
Van Griensven and
colleagues studied people who got two transfusions of plasma — the clear part
of blood that contains antibodies — in Guinea last year. The plasma came from
58 Ebola survivors, most of whom had recovered from Ebola within six months of
donating blood and are thought to have immunity to the strain. Scientists
didn't know what the antibody levels were in the donated plasma and said it was
possible some plasma was more potent than others.
A similar study
on the blood of Ebola survivors in Liberia was discontinued because there
weren't enough patients and another study in Sierra Leone had
treated just three patients by last October. To date, the outbreak first noted
in 2014 has killed more than 11,000 people in West Africa. Ebola was declared
over in Guinea last month, the first time all three affected countries have
stopped the virus' spread.
Some said the
disappointing results should be enough to convince scientists to abandon this
strategy.
"From the
data presented, it doesn't look like this is worth pursuing," said Thomas
Geisbert, an Ebola expert at the University of Texas Medical Branch at
Galveston, who has done similar studies in monkeys. He was not connected to the
latest research.
"The idea
that antibodies from a person who survived Ebola could save lives was always a
long shot, but it was too good an idea not to test," said Ben Neuman, a
virologist at Britain's University of Reading.
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