He beat coronavirus. Now his blood may help save lives

In mid-March, Hackensack University Medical Center in New Jersey announced the first coronavirus-linked death in the Northeast. Since then, there have been more than 16,000 virus-related deaths in the United States, and the toll grows by the hour.

But the health care network that runs the Hackensack hospital now has its eye on reaching another, more hopeful, milestone: finding a treatment for the disease caused by the virus.

As part of a newly approved federal trial, researchers at the network, Hackensack Meridian Health, are preparing to infuse patients fighting for life with antibody-rich blood plasma donated Wednesday by a neonatal doctor who was infected with the virus and recovered.

The hope is that the plasma will boost patients’ immune systems and help them combat the virus before their lungs are destroyed.

“The idea would be to try to prevent them from getting worse,” said Dr. Michele Donato, the chief of stem cell transplantation and cellular therapy at John Theurer Cancer Center, part of Hackensack University Medical Center.

The first infusion of plasma, from blood donated by the doctor, Benjamin C. Planer, was scheduled to start by Saturday, Donato said.

Hackensack’s study is expected to expand as more volunteers who have been infected with the virus meet a crucial threshold: Candidates must be healthy for at least 14 days and free of all traces of the virus. Of more than 3,000 people who have offered to be donors, only 38 have met the initial screening criteria.

A donor’s blood must also have high levels of antibodies, proteins made by the immune system to attack the virus.

Similar efforts are underway at other hospitals, including Mount Sinai Medical Center in Manhattan, Montefiore Medical Center in the Bronx, the Mayo Clinic and Houston Methodist Hospital, according to Dr. Nigel Paneth, a professor of medicine at Michigan State University and a leader of the National COVID-19 Convalescent Plasma Project.

The experimental efforts began after the Food and Drug Administration opened the door to emergency treatment late last month.

The antibody-rich blood product, known as convalescent plasma, has not yet been proven to help those sick with COVID-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus. “But this is one of the only treatments that we have at present,” the Mayo Clinic notes on its website.

At Hackensack, Planer, 58, has become known as the “superdonor.”

He and his family live in Teaneck, New Jersey, the hardest-hit town in the state’s hardest-hit county amid the outbreak. He, his wife and their 17-year-old son contracted the virus, and they all recovered after several days of experiencing relatively minor symptoms.

When his hospital asked for volunteers for a study of an emerging COVID-19 therapy, Planer was among the first to sign up. His blood carries an especially valuable quantity of antibodies, Donato said.

“My body obviously had it,” Planer said. “My body responded. My immunity worked. And I hear that I made a lot of antibodies. I was very happy to hear that — and very happy to share.”

After preliminary screening showed that he was a strong candidate, he called his rabbi: He wanted permission, if needed, to donate blood during Passover, which began at sundown Wednesday.

In the end, it was not necessary. His blood was taken in a process that took about an hour.

FILE -- Hackensack University Medical Center in Hackensack, N.J., Jan. 28, 2020. A New Jersey doctor’s blood was found to have high levels of virus antibodies. Researchers plan to use it to treat other patients. (Bryan Anselm/The New York Times)

The blood was drawn. The antibody-infused plasma — a clear, yellow-orange liquid — was separated from the red blood cells, which were then pumped back into his body through a machine that whirred at his left elbow.

Planer said that the timing of the donation, at the start of the Jewish holiday, was meaningful.

“In the Jewish Talmud, it says that saving one life is like saving the world,” he said. “And that sort of rings true a little bit.”

While there is no evidence that convalescent-plasma treatments can help with COVID-19, the technique has been used to fight other viruses, including Ebola, influenza and severe acute respiratory syndrome, or SARS.

Enthusiasm for the potential treatment grew after a paper published in the Journal of the American Medical Association on March 27 suggested that a small study of five critically ill patients in China had shown promising results.

“We need to be able to impact this epidemic in real time,” said Dr. David S. Perlin, the chief scientific officer of the Center for Discovery and Innovation at Hackensack Meridian, which includes 16 other New Jersey hospitals in addition to Hackensack University Medical Center.

“We’re living it,’’ he added. “It’s our friends and colleagues and family.”

The National COVID-19 Convalescent Plasma Project is a related effort that began several weeks ago as a clearinghouse for information and a way to match willing plasma donors with hospitals and doctors authorised to perform infusions.

“This is really a grassroots organization of academic physician scientists, who came together and said: How can we make this happen?” Paneth said. “This is to keep us alive until the vaccine comes around.”

In addition to being healthy and showing no signs of infection after testing positive for the virus, potential donors must satisfy all other requirements for giving blood.

A donor’s blood type must be matched with a patient’s. And not everyone who contracted the virus will qualify, Donato said.

For the Hackensack study, the plasma will be transfused into people who are attached to ventilators, and to those who have not yet needed the devices.

Donato said she was overwhelmed by the 3,000-person response to the initial call for volunteers. And the number of potential donors, she noted, was only growing.

“As the pandemic progresses, more and more people will be available,” Donato said. “The availability of donors very, very quickly will ramp up.”

She said in a statement that she considered it a “race against time.”

“People are getting sick right now,” she said, “and we are working night and day to save as many lives as possible.”

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