Microsoft Wants To Use Plasma From Recovered COVID-19 Patients To Treat Others

Companies like Apple are doing their part in trying to help curb the COVID-19 virus outbreak by creating and producing face masks and shields for frontliners. They have also teamed up with Google to create contact tracing features that will be built into apps designed for iOS and Android.

It looks like Microsoft is also joining in the fight where the company has announced their latest initiative that they are calling Plasma Bot. According to Microsoft, Plasma Bot is a screening tool that is designed to help patients who recovered from the COVID-19 virus to donate their plasma, which in turn could potentially be used to treat currently-infected patients.

According to Microsoft, “Plasma-derived therapies, like H-Ig, have already been shown to be effective in treating severe viral respiratory infections. The combined capability of these leading commercial manufacturers gives us hope for a scalable, reliable and sustainable treatment for COVID-19.”

The company will be partnering with the CoVIg-19 Plasma Alliance to help study plasma-based therapies. Through the use of Plasma Bot, this screening tool will ask users a series of questions to determine if they can be a potential donor, where it will then direct them to a licensed plasma collection center near them to make their donation.

To date there is no known cure for the COVID-19 virus. We have seen how some existing drugs can help treat certain symptoms related to the disease, but like we said, there is no known specific cure. Multiple vaccines are also in development, but it is estimated that they will probably only arrive in 2021 at the earliest, assuming that these vaccines prove successful.

Tyler Lee
Categories: Medical
Tags: Coronavirus, covid-19, Health, Microsoft