Wichita hospital approved for clinical trial of COVID-19 treatment
A Wichita hospital has been approved to join a clinical trial studying whether antibodies from recovered COVID-19 patients can help save the lives of patients who are severely ill.
Ascension Via Christi in Wichita will partner with the Mayo Clinic to study the effectiveness of convalescent plasma to treat patients infected with the coronavirus.
Developing an effective treatment for the disease would represent a major step forward as public officials weigh when to loosen restrictions aimed at curbing the spread of the coronavirus.
With no approved vaccine or treatment for SARS-CoV-2, the novel coronavirus that causes COVID-19, the fight against the virus has been focused on prevention through sweeping social and behavioral changes.
The survival of those who become infected depends largely on how their bodies react to the disease. Once people become infected, they have to ride it out until it has run its course.
If the antibodies therapy works, it could help severely ill patients recover.
“It’s unusual and it’s frightening to be in the situation where you’re caring for a patient, and you don’t have a drug or a therapy that you can give them that you are sure will work,” said Maggie Hagan, director of infection prevention at Ascension Via Christi and principal investigator in the clinical trial.
“And that’s really the case with this — whether you’re in New York or China or where ever,” Hagan said. “There’s nothing out there that we can say there’s been a large, controlled-trial that shows that this medication works and therefore it is approved for this disease.”
Studies of therapies and drugs are ongoing across the nation. A vaccine is expected to take at least a year to develop.
Ascension Via Christi is the only Wichita healthcare provider to announce a clinical trial. But the University of Kansas Medical Center in Kansas City, Kansas, is also entering clinical trial that could help understand what works and what doesn’t.
The KU Medical Center trial will study the effects of hydroxychloroquine on health care workers who have been exposed to the disease.
Hydroxycholorquine is a widely available antimalarial used to treat a range of ailments from lupus to post-Lyme disease arthritis and has been touted by President Donald Trump as a potential “game changer.”
“We’re trying to get all of our options available,” Via Christi’s Hagan said. “And the convalescent plasma is just one of those options that we would like to have available in case we feel a need to use it on a particular patient.”
The Wichita trial will be available for patients who fit a strict set of criteria at Ascension Via Christi St. Francis. It will be used on severely ill adult patients with life-threatening symptoms.
“It’s not something that’s going to save our full population because we’re going to get it to everybody,” Hagan said. “We’re not at that point. People have to have recovered from the disease in order to make the antibodies, and we’re still in the infancy of that situation, especially in our locality.”
One of the biggest lingering questions about the coronavirus is whether people who have recovered are immune from catching it again, and, if so, for how long.
“We hope that people who recover are themselves immune from getting this again,” she said. “That’s the theory. I think that’s the way it will be, but that is still yet to be proven.”
The therapeutic treatment at Ascension Via Christi will use blood plasma transfusion from recovered patients who donate through the American Red Cross, Hagan said.
It could be ready for testing on patients within weeks, she said. But people should not call the hospital to volunteer.
“It’s not something that we’re going to be using tomorrow, but hopefully in the next few weeks we’ll have the opportunity to use it.”
This story was originally published April 16, 2020 at 3:04 PM.