Complement therapy in COVID-19 patients
Multiple teams around the world are striving to identify effective
therapies for COVID-19. SARS-CoV-2 preventive measures aiming at
developing an effective vaccine as well as therapeutic approaches
including different strategies of anti-viral medications or
virus-specific T cells (VST) have high potential for being effective in
the future. The clinical appearance of severely-ill COVID-19 patients
with atypical ARDS and TMA and the association of this clinical
phenotype with marked complement activation in the circulation and in
the lung (Gao et al., 2020; Lipworth, Chan, Lipworth & RuiWen Kuo,
2020; Magro et al., 2020) suggests that complement may also serve as a
target in COVID-19 patients. Encouraging first data have been reported
for severely ill COVID-19 subjects, who were either treated with a C5-
or a C5a-blocking antibody (Diurno et al., 2020; Gao et al., 2020). Both
approaches resulted in quick clinical improvement and will be further
outlined below. In this section we will discuss potential clinical
strategies that we can adopt now from other disciplines to prevent acute
mortality from atypical ARDS and other organ failure in
COVID-19-affected individuals with a particular focus on
complement-mediated TMA.