US Food and Drug Administration

CIRM-supported therapy for blood cancers gets FDA fast track

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People often complain about how long it can take to turn a scientific discovery into an approved therapy for patients. And they’re right. It can take years, decades even. But for Immune-Onc Therapeutics the path to FDA approval may just have been shortened.

Back in April of 2021 the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine (CIRM) approved investing $6 million in Immune-Onc to conduct a clinical trial for patients with acute myeloid leukemia (AML) and chronic myelomonocytic leukemia (CMML). AML and CMML are both types of blood cancer. AML affects approximately 20,000 people in the United States each year and has a 5-year survival rate of about 25 percent. Anywhere from 15-30 percent of CMML cases eventually progress into AML.

Dr. Paul Woodard and his team are treating patients with an antibody therapy called IO-202 that targets leukemic stem cells.  The antibody works by blocking a signal named LILRB4 which is associated with decreased rates of survival in AML patients.  The goal is to attain complete cancer remissions and prolonged survival.

Well, they must be doing something right because they just received Fast Track designation from the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for IO-202. Getting this designation is a big deal because its goal is to speed up the development and review of drugs to treat serious conditions and fill an unmet medical need to get important new medicines to patients earlier.

Getting a Fast Track designation means the team at Immune-Onc may be:

  • Eligible for more written communications and even face-to-face meetings with the FDA to discuss the development plan of IO-202
  • Eligible for Accelerated Approval and Priority Review if relevant criteria are met, which may result in faster approval.

In a press release Dr. Woodard said this was great news.  “We are pleased that the FDA has granted IO-202 Fast Track designation in recognition of its potential to improve outcomes for people with relapsed or refractory AML. We look forward to working closely with the FDA to accelerate the clinical development of IO-202, which is currently being evaluated as a monotherapy and in combination with other agents in a Phase 1 dose escalation and expansion trial in patients with AML with monocytic differentiation and in chronic myelomonocytic leukemia (CMML).”

The FDA also granted IO-202 Orphan Drug Designation for treatment of AML in 2020. That’s defined as a therapy that’s intended for the treatment, prevention or diagnosis of a rare disease or condition, affecting less than 200,000 persons in the US.

Getting Orphan Drug Designation qualifies Immune-Onc for incentives including tax credits for clinical trials and the potential for seven years of market exclusivity if and when it is fully approved by the FDA.

CIRM-Funded Study Helping Babies Battle a Deadly Immune Disorder Gets Boost from FDA

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Hataalii Begay, age 4, first child treated with UCSF gene therapy for Artemis-SCID

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When Hataalii Begay was born in a remote part of the Navajo nation he was diagnosed with a rare, usually fatal condition. Today, thanks to a therapy developed at UCSF and funded by CIRM, he’s a normal healthy four year old boy running around in cowboy boots.

That stem cell therapy could now help save the lives of other children born with this deadly immune disorder because it has been granted fast-track review status by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA).

The California Institute for Regenerative Medicine (CIRM) has invested $12 million to test this therapy in a clinical trial at UC San Francisco.

The disorder is Artemis-SCID, a form of severe combined immunodeficiency disease. Children born with this condition have no functioning immune system so even a simple infection can prove life-threatening or fatal.

Currently, the only approved treatment for Artemis-SCID is a bone-marrow transplant, but many children are unable to find a healthy matched donor for that procedure. Even when they do find a donor they often need regular injections of immunoglobulin to boost their immune system.

In this clinical trial, UCSF Doctors Mort Cowan and Jennifer Puck are using the patient’s own blood stem cells, taken from their bone marrow. In the lab, the cells are modified to correct the genetic mutation that causes Artemis-SCID and then re-infused back into the patients. The goal is that over the course of several months these cells will create a new blood supply, one that is free of Artemis-SCID, and that will in turn help repair the child’s immune system.

So far the team has treated ten newly-diagnosed infants and three older children who failed transplants. Dr. Cowan says early data from the trial is encouraging. “With gene therapy, we are seeing these babies getting older. They have normal T-cell immunity and are getting immunized and vaccinated. You wouldn’t know they had any sort of condition if you met them; it’s very heartening.”

Because of that encouraging data, the FDA is granting this approach Regenerative Medicine Advanced Therapy (RMAT) designation. RMAT is a fast-track designation that can help speed up the development, review and potential approval of treatments for serious or life-threatening diseases.

“This is great news for the team at UCSF and in particular for the children and families affected by Artemis-SCID,” says Dr. Maria T. Millan, the President and CEO of CIRM. “The RMAT designation means that innovative forms of cell and gene therapies like this one may be able to accelerate their route to full approval by the FDA and be available to all the patients who need it.”

Overcoming obstacles and advancing treatments to patients

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UC Davis GMP Manufacturing facility: Photo courtesy UC Davis

When you are trying to do something that has never been done before, there are bound to be challenges to meet and obstacles to overcome. At the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine (CIRM) we are used to coming up with great ideas and hearing people ask “Well, how are you going to do that?”

Our new 5-year Strategic Plan is how. It’s the roadmap that will help guide us as we work to overcome critical bottlenecks in bringing regenerative medicine therapies to people in need.

Providing more than money

People often think of CIRM as a funding agency, providing the money needed to do research. That’s true, but it’s only part of the story. With every project we fund, we also offer a lot of support. That’s particularly true at the clinical stage, where therapies are being tested in people. Projects we fund in clinical trials don’t just get money, they also have access to:

  • Alpha Stem Cells Clinic Network – This is a group of specialized medical centers that have the experience and expertise to deliver new stem cell and gene therapies.
  • The CIRM Cell and Gene Therapy Center – This helps with developing projects, overcoming manufacturing problems, and offers guidance on working with the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to get permission to run clinical trials.
  • CIRM Clinical Advisory Panels (CAPs) – These are teams put together to help advise researchers on a clinical trial and to overcome problems. A crucial element of a CAP is a patient advocate who can help design a trial around the needs of the patients, to help with patient recruitment and retention.

Partnering with key stakeholders

Now, we want to build on this funding model to create new ways to support researchers in bringing their work to patients. This includes earlier engagement with regulators like the FDA to ensure that projects match their requirements. It includes meetings with insurers and other healthcare stakeholders, to make sure that if a treatment is approved, that people can get access to it and afford it.

In the past, some in the regenerative medicine field thought of the FDA as an obstacle to approval of their work. But as David Martin, a CIRM Board member and industry veteran says, the FDA is really a key ally.

“Turning a promising drug candidate into an approved therapy requires overcoming many bottlenecks… CIRM’s most effective and committed partner in accelerating this is the FDA.”

Removing barriers to manufacturing

Another key area highlighted in our Strategic Plan is overcoming manufacturing obstacles. Because these therapies are “living medicines” they are complex and costly to produce. There is often a shortage of skilled technicians to do the jobs that are needed, and the existing facilities may not be able to meet the demand for mass production once the FDA gives permission to start a clinical trial. 

To address all these issues CIRM wants to create a California Manufacturing Network that combines academic innovation and industry expertise to address critical manufacturing bottlenecks. It will also coordinate training programs to help build a diverse and expertly trained manufacturing workforce.

CIRM will work with academic institutions that already have their own manufacturing facilities (such as UC Davis) to help develop improved ways of producing therapies in sufficient quantities for research and clinical trials. The Manufacturing Network will also involve industry partners who can develop facilities capable of the large-scale production of therapies that will be needed when products are approved by the FDA for wider use.

CIRM, in collaboration with this network, will also help develop education and hands-on training programs for cell and gene therapy manufacturing at California community colleges and universities. By providing internships and certification programs we will help create a talented, diverse workforce that is equipped to meet the growing demands of the industry.

You can read more about these goals in our 2022-27 Strategic Plan.

Looking back and looking forward: good news for two CIRM-supported studies

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Dr. Rosa Bacchetta on the right with Brian Lookofsky (left) and Taylor Lookofsky after CIRM funded Dr. Bacchetta’s work in October 2019. Taylor has IPEX syndrome

It’s always lovely to end the week on a bright note and that’s certainly the case this week, thanks to some encouraging news about CIRM-funded research targeting blood disorders that affect the immune system.

Stanford’s Dr. Rosa Bacchetta and her team learned that their proposed therapy for IPEX Syndrome had been given the go-ahead by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to test it in people in a Phase 1 clinical trial.

IPEX Syndrome (it’s more formal and tongue twisting name is Immune dysregulation Polyendocrinopathy Enteropathy X-linked syndrome) is a life-threatening disorder that affects children. It’s caused by a mutation in the FOXP3 gene. Immune cells called regulatory T Cells normally function to protect tissues from damage but in patients with IPEX syndrome, lack of functional Tregs render the body’s own tissues and organs to autoimmune attack that could be fatal in early childhood. 

Current treatment options include a bone marrow transplant which is limited by available donors and graft versus host disease and immune suppressive drugs that are only partially effective. Dr. Rosa Bacchetta and her team at Stanford will use gene therapy to insert a normal version of the FOXP3 gene into the patient’s own T Cells to restore the normal function of regulatory T Cells.

This approach has already been accorded an orphan drug and rare pediatric disease designation by the FDA (we blogged about it last year)

Orphan drug designation is a special status given by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for potential treatments of rare diseases that affect fewer than 200,000 in the U.S. This type of status can significantly help advance treatments for rare diseases by providing financial incentives in the form of tax credits towards the cost of clinical trials and prescription drug user fee waivers.

Under the FDA’s rare pediatric disease designation program, the FDA may grant priority review to Dr. Bacchetta if this treatment eventually receives FDA approval. The FDA defines a rare pediatric disease as a serious or life-threatening disease in which the serious or life-threatening manifestations primarily affect individuals aged from birth to 18 years and affects fewer than 200,000 people in the U.S.

Congratulations to the team and we wish them luck as they begin the trial.

Dr. Donald Kohn, Photo courtesy UCLA

Someone who needs no introduction to regular readers of this blog is UCLA’s Dr. Don Kohn. A recent study in the New England Journal of Medicine highlighted how his work in developing a treatment for severe combined immune deficiency (SCID) has helped save the lives of dozens of children.

Now a new study in the journal Blood shows that those benefits are long-lasting, with 90% of patients who received the treatment eight to 11 years ago still disease-free.

In a news release Dr. Kohn said: “What we saw in the first few years was that this therapy worked, and now we’re able to say that it not only works, but it works for more than 10 years. We hope someday we’ll be able to say that these results last for 80 years.”

Ten children received the treatment between 2009 and 2012. Nine were babies or very young children, one was 15 years old at the time. That teenager was the only one who didn’t see their immune system restored. Dr. Kohn says this suggests that the therapy is most effective in younger children.

Dr. Kohn has since modified the approach his team uses and has seen even more impressive and, we hope, equally long-lasting results.

Hitting our goals: Making good progress

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Way, way back in 2015 – seems like a lifetime ago doesn’t it – the team at CIRM sat down and planned out our Big 6 goals for the next five years. The end result was a Strategic Plan that was bold, ambitious and set us on course to do great things or kill ourselves trying. Well, looking back we can take some pride in saying we did a really fine job, hitting almost every goal and exceeding them in some cases. So, as we plan our next five-year Strategic Plan we thought it worthwhile to look back at where we started and what we achieved. Goal #5 was Advance.

A dictionary definition of progression is “The act of moving forward or proceeding in a course.” That’s precisely what we set out to do when we set one of the goals in our 2015 Strategic Plan. We wanted to do all that we could to make sure the work we were funding could advance to the next stage. The goal we set was:

Advance: Increase projects advancing to the next stage of development by 50%.

The first question we faced was what did we mean by progression and how were we going to measure it? The answer basically boiled down to this: when a CIRM award completes one stage of research and gets CIRM funding to move on to the next stage or to develop a second generation of the same device or therapy.

In the pre-2016 days we’d had some success, on average getting around nine progression events every year. But if we were going to increase that by 50 percent we knew we had to step up our game and offer some incentives so that the team behind a successful project had a reason, other than just scientific curiosity, to try and move their research to the next level.

So, we created a series of linkages between the different stages of research, so the product of each successful investment was the prerequisite for the next stage of development for the research or technology.

We changed the way we funded projects, going from offering awards on an irregular basis to having them happen according to a pre-defined schedule with each program type offered multiple times a year. This meant potential applicants knew when the next opportunity to apply would come, enabling them to prepare and file at the time that was best for them and not just because we said so. We also timed these schedules so that programs could progress from one stage to the next without interruption.

But that’s not all. We recognized that some people may be great scientists at one level but didn’t have the experience or expertise to carry their project forward. So, we created both an Accelerating Center and Translating Center to help them do that. The Translating Center helped projects do the work necessary to get ready to apply to the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for permission to start a clinical trial. The Accelerating Center helped the team prepare that application for the trial and then plan how that trial would be carried out.

Creating these two centers had an additional benefit; it meant the work that did progress did so faster and was of a higher quality than it might otherwise have been.

Putting all those new building blocks in place meant a lot of work for the CIRM team, on top of their normal duties. But, as always, the team rose to the challenge. By the end of December 2020, a total of 74 projects had advanced or progressed to the next level, an increase of 100 percent on our pre-2016 days.

When we were laying out the goals we said that “The full implementation of these programs will create the chassis of a machine that provides a continuous, predictable, and timely pathway for the discovery and development of promising stem cell treatments.” Thanks to the voter approved Proposition 14 we now have the fund to help those treatments realize that promise.

Three UC’s Join Forces to Launch CRISPR Clinical Trial Targeting Sickle Cell Disease

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Sickle shaped red blood cells

The University of California, San Francisco (UCSF), in collaboration with UC Berkeley (UCB) and UC Los Angeles (UCLA), have been given permission by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to launch a first-in-human clinical trial using CRISPR technology as a gene-editing technique to cure Sickle Cell Disease.

This research has been funded by CIRM from the early stages and, in a co-funding partnership with theNational Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute under the Cure Sickle Cell initiatve, CIRM supported the work that allowed this program to gain FDA permission to proceed into clinical trials.    

Sickle Cell Disease is a blood disorder that affects around 100,000 people, mostly Black and Latinx people in the US. It is caused by a single genetic mutation that results in the production of “sickle” shaped red blood cells. Normal red blood cells are round and smooth and flow easily through blood vessels. But the sickle-shaped ones are rigid and brittle and clump together, clogging vessels and causing painful crisis episodes, recurrent hospitalization, multi-organ damage and mini-strokes.    

The three UC’s have combined their respective expertise to bring this program forward.

The CRISPR-Cas9 technology was developed by UC Berkeley’s Nobel laureate Jennifer Doudna, PhD. UCLA is a collaborating site, with expertise in genetic analysis and cell manufacturing and UCSF Benioff Children’s Hospital Oakland is the lead clinical center, leveraging its renowned expertise in cord blood and marrow transplantation and in gene therapy for sickle cell disease.

The approach involves retrieving blood stem cells from the patient and, using a technique involving electrical pulses, these cells are treated to correct the mutation using CRISPR technology. The corrected cells will then be transplanted back into the patient.

Dr. Mark Walters

In a news release, UCSF’s Dr. Mark Walters, the principal investigator of the project, says using this new gene-editing approach could be a game-changer. “This therapy has the potential to transform sickle cell disease care by producing an accessible, curative treatment that is safer than the current therapy of stem cell transplant from a healthy bone marrow donor. If this is successfully applied in young patients, it has the potential to prevent irreversible complications of the disease. Based on our experience with bone marrow transplants, we predict that correcting 20% of the genes should be sufficient to out-compete the native sickle cells and have a strong clinical benefit.”

Dr. Maria T. Millan, President & CEO of CIRM, said this collaborative approach can be a model for tackling other diseases. “When we entered into our partnership with the NHLBI we hoped that combining our resources and expertise could accelerate the development of cell and gene therapies for SCD. And now to see these three UC institutions collaborating on bringing this therapy to patients is truly exciting and highlights how working together we can achieve far more than just operating individually.”

The 4-year study will include six adults and three adolescents with severe sickle cell disease. It is planned to begin this summer in Oakland and Los Angeles.

The three UCs combined to produce a video to accompany news about the trial. Here it is:

Hitting our goals: regulatory reform

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Way, way back in 2015 – seems like a lifetime ago doesn’t it – the team at CIRM sat down and planned out our Big 6 goals for the next five years. The end result was a Strategic Plan that was bold, ambitious and set us on course to do great things or kill ourselves trying. Well, looking back we can take some pride in saying we did a really fine job, hitting almost every goal and exceeding them in some cases. So, as we plan our next five-year Strategic Plan we thought it worthwhile to look back at where we started and what we achieved. We are going to start with Regulatory Reform.

The political landscape in 2015 was dramatically different than it is today. Compared to more conventional drugs and therapies stem cells were considered a new, and very different, approach to treating diseases and disorders. At the time the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) was taking a very cautious approach to approving any stem cell therapies for a clinical trial.

A survey of CIRM stakeholders found that 70% said the FDA was “the biggest impediment for the development of stem cell treatments.” One therapy, touted by the FDA as a success story, had such a high clinical development hurdle placed on it that by the time it was finally approved, five years later, its market potential had significantly eroded and the product failed commercially. As one stakeholder said: “Is perfect becoming the enemy of better?”

So, we set ourselves a goal of establishing a new regulatory paradigm, working with Congress, academia, industry, and patients, to bring about real change at the FDA and to find ways to win faster approval for promising stem cell therapies, without in any way endangering patients.

It seemed rather ambitious at the time, but achieving that goal happened much faster than any of us anticipated. With a sustained campaign by CIRM and other industry leaders, working with the patient advocacy groups, the FDA, Congress, and President Obama, the 21st Century Cures Act was signed into law on December 13, 2016.

President Obama signs the 21st Century Cures Act.
Photo courtesy of NBC News

The law did something quite radical; it made the perspectives of patients an integral part of the FDA’s decision-making and approval process in the development of drugs, biological products and devices. And it sped up the review process by:

In a way the FDA took its foot off the brake but didn’t hit the accelerator, so the process moved faster, but in a safe, manageable way.

Fast forward to today and eight projects that CIRM funds have been granted RMAT designation. We have become allies with the FDA in helping advance the field. We have created a unique partnership with the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute (NHLBI) to support the Cure Sickle Cell initiative and accelerate the development of cell and gene therapies for sickle cell disease.

The landscape has changed since we set a goal of regulatory reform. We still have work to do. But now we are all working together to achieve the change we all believe is both needed and possible.

Making a good thing better

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Thomas Edison

Legend has it that Thomas Edison “failed” 1,000 times before he managed to create the incandescent lightbulb. Edison says he didn’t get discouraged, instead he looked at each unsuccessful experiment as being one step closer to finding the method that really worked. That’s a lesson in optimism and persistence for all of us.

Lineage Cell Therapeutics has that same spirit. Lineage is trying to develop a stem cell therapy to help people with spinal cord injuries. CIRM invested $14.3 million in the first version of this approach which produced encouraging results. But encouraging is not enough. So, Lineage set about doing a complete overhaul of the therapy known as OPC1.

The idea behind it is to turn embryonic stem cells into oligodendrocyte progenitor cells (OPCs). These OPCs are precursors to cells that play an important role in supporting and protecting nerve cells in the central nervous system, the area damaged in a spinal cord injury. By transplanting these cells at the injury site it’s hoped they will help restore some of the broken connections, allowing patients to regain some movement and feeling.

In the original trial many patients, who had been paralyzed from the chest down, regained some use of their arms, hands and even fingers. This was better than any previous therapy had managed. But for Lineage it wasn’t good enough. So, they set about redesigning their whole manufacturing process, making improvements at every step along the way.

In a news release they outlined those improvements:

  • A new ready-to-inject formulation of OPC1, which enables clinical use at a much larger number of spinal cord treatment centers, accelerating enrollment for a larger and potentially registrational clinical trial.
  • Elimination of dose preparation, reducing overall preparation time from 24 hours to 30 minutes and cutting logistics costs by approximately 90%.
  • A 10 to 20-fold increase in OPC1 production scale, sufficient to support late-stage clinical development and which can be further scaled to meet initial commercial use.
  • A 50-75% reduction in product impurities.
  • Improvements in OPC1 functional activity, as assessed by cellular migration and secretion of key growth factors.

They also came up with new quality control tests to make sure everything was working well and eliminated all animal-based production reagents.

Brian Culley, Lineage CEO was, understandably, enthusiastic about the changes and its prospects for helping people with spinal cord injuries:

“Manufacturing is the foundation of cell therapy and the significant enhancements we have achieved with OPC1 marks the second time we have successfully transformed a research-grade production process into one capable of supporting a successful commercial product. Our objective is to be the premier allogeneic cell therapy company and our dedication to manufacturing excellence allows us not only to reduce or eliminate certain regulatory and commercial hurdles, but also establish strong competitive barriers in our field.”

Lineage are now hoping to go back to the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in the near future and get permission to run another clinical trial.

Here are stories of the impact the first generation of this approach have already had on people.

CIRM-funded therapy to ease the impact of chemotherapy

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Treatments for cancer have advanced a lot in recent years, but many still rely on the use of chemotherapy to either shrink tumors before surgery or help remove cancerous cells the surgery missed. The chemo can be very effective, but it’s also very toxic. Angiocrine Bioscience Inc. is developing a way to reduce those toxic side effects, and they just got a nice vote of confidence for that approach.

The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has granted Angiocrine Regenerative Medicine Advanced Therapy (RMAT) designation for their product AB-205.

RMAT is a big deal. It means the therapy, in this case AB-205, has already shown it is safe and potentially beneficial to patients, so the designation means that if it continues to be safe and effective it may be eligible for a faster, more streamlined approval process. And that means it can get to the patients who need it, outside of a clinical trial, faster.

What is AB-205? Well it’s made from genetically engineered cells, derived from cord blood, designed to help alleviate or accelerate recovery from the toxic side effects of chemotherapy for people undergoing treatment for lymphoma and other aggressive cancers of the blood or lymph system.

CIRM awarded Angiocrine Bioscience $6.2 million in 2018 to help carry out the Phase 2 clinical trial testing the therapy. In a news release ,CIRM President & CEO, Dr. Maria Millan, said there is a real need for this kind of therapy.

“This is a project that CIRM has supported from an earlier stage of research, highlighting our commitment to moving the most promising research out of the lab and into people. Lymphoma is the most common blood cancer and the 6th most commonly diagnosed cancer in California. Despite advances in therapy many patients still suffer severe complications from the chemotherapy, so any treatment that can reduce those complications can not only improve quality of life but also, we hope, improve long term health outcomes for patients.”

In a news release Dr. Paul Finnegan, Angiocrine’s CEO, welcomed the news.

“The RMAT designation speaks to the clinical meaningfulness and the promising efficacy data and safety profile of AB-205 based on our Phase 1b/2 study. This is an important step in accelerating the development of AB-205 towards its first market approval. We appreciate the thorough assessment provided by the FDA reviewers and the support from our partner, the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine.” 

The investment in Angiocrine marked a milestone for CIRM. It was the 50th clinical trial we had funded. It was a cause for celebration then. We’re hoping it will be a cause for an even bigger celebration in the not too distant future.

The company hopes to start a Phase 3 clinical trial in the US and Europe next year.

Want to help us solve a mystery?

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Patient that has recovered from Covid-19 donating blood plasma. Photo courtesy Science Photo

Convalescent plasma has been in the news a lot lately as a potential treatment for people infected with the coronavirus. In August the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) granted emergency use authorization (EUA) to use these products based on preliminary data that suggested it might help people battling COVID. But there are still a lot of unanswered questions about this approach.

And that’s where you come in.

Plasma is a component of blood that carries proteins called antibodies that are usually involved in defending our bodies against viral infections.  We also know that blood plasma from patients that have recovered from COVID-19, referred to as convalescent plasma, contain antibodies against the virus that can be used as a potential treatment for COVID-19. 

That’s the theory, but the reality is that there are still a lot we don’t know, basic questions such as does it really work, how does it work, does it work for everyone or just some patients? A clinical  grant includes testing the plasma in COVID-19 Positive patients that CIRM is funding with City of Hope, UC Irvine and Translational Genomics Research Institute (TGen) hopes to answer those questions. 

The first step is getting the plasma from people who have recovered from COVID and then testing it to make sure it’s safe and to identify what blood type it is, so you can match that blood type with the person receiving it.

But plasma doesn’t contain just one kind of antibody, there are many antibodies and each one works in a slightly different way. For example, two antibodies, IGM and IGG, target in on the spike protein on the coronavirus. The goal is to block that spike and prevent the virus from spreading throughout the body. IGM has up to 10 ‘arms’ and so has the potential to bind multiple copies of the spike, whereas IGG has only 2 arms, but lasts longer. Both IGM and IGG also come in many different flavors, allowing them to bind to many different parts of the spike, some being more protective than others.

That’s one of the things that this trial is trying to find out. And you can help them do that. The trial needs volunteers, volunteers to donate the plasma and volunteers to try the therapy.

The team is evaluating changes that occur before and after plasma treatment.  Many recipients have no immediate response, a few get dramatically better, and some continue to have symptoms long after discharge from the hospital.  These so-called “long-haulers” can have debilitating problems, months after becoming infected. The study hopes to evaluate these variable responses to plasma treatment.

But more people are needed if we are to truly understand what works best. We need people who are newly infected, those being treated with plasma, and those that have recovered from the virus.

We are particularly interested in recruiting people from the Black and Latinx communities, groups that are often underserved when it comes to access to medical care.

The team has created a website to make it easy to find out more about the clinical trial, and to see if you are a good candidate to be part of it, either as a donor or recipient.

Lives are at stake and time is short so join us, help us find answers to the most pressing medical issue of our times. It’s a chance to do something that might benefit your family, your friends and your community.