An awareness initiative supported by pharma companies, research institutions, nonprofits, and tech companies is urging recovered COVID-19 patients to donate their blood plasma.
The Fight Is In Us effort helps these patients know if they are eligible to donate their plasma and connects them to donor centers. Recovered COVID-19 patients need to donate plasma within two months of recovery to ensure their blood has a high enough concentration of antibodies.
The effort also explains the process of donating blood plasma, how the plasma is used to help current COVID-19 patients and how data from the effort will be used.
There are several ongoing clinical studies looking into the effectiveness of using a recovered patient’s blood plasma to treat patients currently ill from COVID-19 or to develop treatments and vaccines. One method of treatment currently being studied is a direct transfusion of plasma to patients and another is using the donated plasma to develop medicines called hyperimmune globulin.
The Fight Is In Us website has a guide for these patients to determine if they are eligible to donate and shows them nearby donor centers based on their zip code. The campaign began in the U.S. and will later expand to Europe.
The effort is backed by major health and tech players, including tech companies Microsoft and Uber Health, research hospitals Mayo Clinic and Johns Hopkins University, plasma companies Takeda and CSL Behring, insurer Anthem, diagnostics company LabCorp and many more.
The Ad Council is providing marketing support and Ashfield Healthcare is supporting the effort’s contact center.
