Experts at the Dow University of Health Sciences (DUHS) on Monday claimed to have extracted immunoglobulin or antibodies from the blood of recovered patients of COVID-19, which could be used to treat patients of the viral disease.
Speaking at a news conference, DUHS Vice Chancellor Prof Saeed Quraishy called the extraction of immunoglobulin a “very important breakthrough” in the war against COVID-19 but added that they would go for clinical trials and other prerequisites to establish the efficacy of using such immunoglobulin in treating coronavirus.
He was accompanied by Dr Shaukat Ali, the head of the team that extracted the immunoglobulin from plasma donated by recovered coronavirus patients.
Prof Quraishy said this method of treatment was safe and had low risk involved. Through this method, immunoglobulin is prepared after separation of antibodies found in the blood of a recovered patient. This method is considerably different from the plasma therapy and it should be noted that the treatment by hyper immunoglobulin (H-IVIG) is approved by the US Federal agency, Food and Drug Administration (FDA), for normal conditions.
Plasma therapy, on the other hand, is only allowed in emergencies due to its side effects. The DUHS research team led by Dr Ali has developed this H-IVIG after days of hard work. The team was able to collect the first blood sample in March 2020 and managed to isolate antibodies chemically, purified them and later concentrated them using ultrafiltration techniques that removed the remaining unwanted materials from the final product.
The method is also a type of passive immunisation but uses purified antibodies rather than the whole plasma. The treatment is considered safer and more effective than the plasma transfusion as it does not carry the undesired components of blood like plasma proteins, and potential bacterial and viral pathogens.
Such purified antibodies are commercially available globally against diseases like tetanus, rabies, influenza and hepatitis. The same strategy has been effectively used in the time of other viral epidemics like MERS, SARS and EBOLA.
Prof Quraishy has tasked clinicians at the Dow hospital with teaming up with researchers to devise a strategy for fulfilling ethical and regulatory requirements for trials.
The lead researcher, Dr Ali, is the principal of the Dow College of Biotechnology. The other members of his team included Dr Shobha Luxmi, Syed Muneebuddin, Mir Rashid Ali, Ayesha Ali, Mujtaba Khan, Fatima Anjum and Dr Sohaib Tauheed.
Already six world renowned multinational companies have joined hands to proceed in the similar direction to produce immunoglobulin from recovered patients. As the COVID-19 strain prevalent in Pakistan has a few mutations, it is expected that the local immunoglobulin against local virus strain would be very effective.
