Mayo Clinic Professor weighs in on assessing plasma treatment for COVID

Mayo Clinic Prof of Anesthesiology Dr. Michael Joyner is searching for ways to treat and ease affects of the deadly coronavirus. He joins Yahoo Finance’s On The Move to weigh in on coronavirus testing and how plasma treatment will help bodies fight off the virus.

Video Transcript

ADAM SHAPIRO: One of the things Peter was just talking about was getting things back on track. And one of the ways to do that is opening the economy. But we keep hearing from all the experts that you can't do that without proper testing.

Joining us now to discuss testing is Dr. Michael Joyner from the Mayo Clinic. He's a professor of anesthesiology. It's not just testing, sir. Doctor, there's also the issue of treatment and blood plasma transfusions.

Let's start at the beginning, though, with testing. Because you have a serological blood testing program at Mayo. What is it? How does it work? And how quickly could it be expanded nationwide? How quickly does the test take? Doctor, do we have you? I think you have to unmute yourself. There we go. There you go.

MICHAEL JOYNER: What the test does is simply, Adam, take a blood sample from people and do a lookback test to see if they have antibodies to COVID-19. And that helps us understand if they were infected with COVID-19. This is important not only for the people who we know had symptoms, but because we believe there are a lot of minimally symptomatic or asymptomatic carriers.

And as you have this sort of lookback testing, you can do a lot of things with it. One, you can have some understanding of how many people in the population or in a given area were infected. And then, two, who is safe to go back to work without any restrictions. This can also be used in conjunction with the nasal swab testing, as we move forward to start looking at outbreaks and outbreak control and tracking, which is a critical element of traditional public health when you're attempting to suppress infectious disease.

So this sort of thing is really, really important. And testing is key and also generating a denominator so we understand something about the ecosystem and natural history of the disease is also a key. The Mayo test has been come online I think for about a week. And they're ramping up capacity as we speak. And additional tests are coming on board.

And again, capacity is going higher and higher. There are some limitations potentially with the reagents and other things, but my colleagues in lab medicine are excellent at getting those logistical hurdles overcome and worked out.

JULIE HYMAN: So Adam mentioned that you were also working on the treatment side, and you're one of the folks who's looking at this idea that you can use plasma from people who have had the disease already in order to treat folks who are struggling with it now, which almost sounds like a sort of a vaccine approach in a way, right? Introducing part of the virus into the body.

How widespread, though, can that kind of treatment be? Because you need the people, right, to have had it already, and you need-- I don't know how far plasma goes, right, from one person.

MICHAEL JOYNER: So this is called passive immunity. It was a very, very common technique before antibiotics and vaccination, which essentially means before 1950 or before World War II. It was effective to treat diphtheria. It was effective to treat the measles, mumps, even polio, and/or prevent polio. And it was effective also in the 1918 Spanish flu epidemic, and more recently, in the SARS outbreak.

So basically, what you do is take advantage of the fact that patients who have recovered have a whole lot of anti-COVID-19 antibodies in their plasma. You harvest that plasma and give that plasma to patients who are currently affected. Or you give it to people who are at high risk of infection to prevent them from getting infected.

This happens regularly when hepatitis A outbreaks are suppressed with gamma globulin, a concentrated form of antibodies that are obtained from humans. So this is an old strategy. It can be done. What's unique here is that we need to scale up quickly. It's come together through a consortium of just sort of interested parties who've raised their hands. The FDA is facilitating, and the national blood banking community is getting up to speed.

You're always going to be a little bit behind the eight ball because you have to wait until you have recovered patients. So I think we can't scale up because you have so many asymptomatic patients, the donor pool's potentially vast. Each person can probably give about two to six units, which gives you a potentially huge supply if it can be distributed and used intelligently.

And we have to remain hopeful, but also have some scientific skepticism to do the sorts of registry and case control studies and randomized clinical trials to prove it works and to demonstrate what the best use case is. And that's what we're currently doing.

AKIKO FUJITA: Doctor, we had a chance to speak with Miami mayor Francis Suarez last week, who was actually going to donate his plasma as well. And, you know, the day we spoke to him, he'd already spoken to another patient who had used his plasma and said that that person was starting to stabilize as a result of that.

I'm curious, though. You know, he made it sound like there was some rigorous testing to make sure that she was the proper donor.

MICHAEL JOYNER: Correct.

AKIKO FUJITA: You know, how difficult is it to find that match, and how rigorous is that process to get to actually donating?

MICHAEL JOYNER: So this is very similar to a regular blood donation, especially a plasma donation. So people have to first be eligible to donate blood under regular circumstances, but remember, in the United States, about 15 million blood transfusions are given a year. So there's a lot of infrastructure.

But this is about plasma, which is a specialized product. So you have to have had currently a test positive case of COVID-19, which is a challenge because the testing has been so limited. Then you have to have recovered and be symptom free for somewhere between 14 and 28 days before you can donate. The American Association of Blood Banks, aabb.org, has a site locator with a lot of information about where people who have recovered from COVID-19 can go to donate.

Now one of the important things somebody asked earlier about the serologic testing, eventually, we're going to be able to do lookback testing, and all the people who you say, you know, I had the worst case of flu in my life in March, was it COVID, we'll be able to test those individuals, and hopefully they can join the donor pool.

The other important thing to remember here is that if you look at these sorts of outbreaks of infectious disease, there's typically a peak, a valley, and a second peak and even a third peak. So one of the things we have to think about-- people were talking about reopening the economy-- is have the tools we need, in addition to testing, social distancing, and outbreak tracking and tracing.

We're going to need to have products like this as sort of the smoke jumpers who can come in and help put out the brush fires. This product will probably be replaced in September perhaps by a concentrated form of the product. And then we can wait for the vaccine and biotech cavalry to arrive.

ADAM SHAPIRO: I am curious. You talk about the biotech cavalry, but the cavalry right now are the doctors and nurses on the frontlines. I don't know if you are on a daily basis going into hospital, but how are you doing? How are your colleagues who are there every day doing?

MICHAEL JOYNER: Right. We've been very fortunate here in the flyover zone in Minnesota where we have a lot of inherent social distancing. People aren't on the subway and so forth and live in mostly detached homes. We don't have a whole lot of concentrated poverty. And we have a lot of social cohesion here and a lot of people who reflexively follow the rules. We shut down early in the state of Minnesota, so we have one of the slowest doubling times in the country.

And while things have been shut down, which is causing concerns that we heard about earlier, the hospitals are not full, the ICUs are not full, and people are managing. So we've been very fortunate here, and it has not been a high stress situation. And many people like myself-- I'm an anesthesiologist when I'm not doing research-- really have not been busy in our normal day jobs.

However, I visit on a daily basis with Professor Liise-anne Pirofski at Einstein who works at Montefiore Medical Center in the Bronx, and she certainly tells us some very interesting stories about a completely full hospital, ICUs really jumping up out of everywhere all over the hospitals, ventilated patients everywhere. And the sorts of stress that that group is under is really quite remarkable, really, in many ways, equal to high intensity combat.

ADAM SHAPIRO: Yeah. We appreciate your being with us. Dr. Michael Joyner of the Mayo Clinic, professor of anesthesiology, all the best to you.

MICHAEL JOYNER: Thank you.