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.