Welcome to Public Health On Call, a podcast from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health,

where we bring evidence, experience, and perspective to make sense of today's leading health challenges.

If you have questions or ideas for us, please send an email to Public Health Question at jh.h.u.

That's Public Health Question at jh.edu for future podcast episodes.

Hey, listeners, it's Lindsay Smith-Rogers.

In the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic when there were no vaccines or treatments,

convalescent plasma, antibody containing blood from people who recovered from COVID-19,

saved countless lives.

Today, we bring you an episode from our friends at the podcast, MMI Monthly, from Bench to Breakthrough.

Guest host Thomas Locke talks about how nearly five years later, convalescent plasma has received

FDA approval to be used as a potential treatment for immunocompromised patients.

Let's listen.

Hello and welcome to MMI Monthly, a podcast sharing public health stories from Bench to Breakthrough.

I'm Thomas Locke. Today we focus on the evolution of COVID-19 convalescent plasma, CCP,

from its emergency use during the pandemic to a newly approved treatment protecting

immunocompromise patients against COVID-19.

Our podcast follows the news that One Blood, a not-for-profit blood center in Florida,

has had its application to manufacture and distribute convalescent plasma for COVID-19,

fully approved by the FDA.

This is the first ever approval for convalescent plasma.

To understand how we've got here and the significance of that approval, we need to go back to the early days of the pandemic. Because it's here

that the idea of using convalescent plasma for COVID-19 was born. Here's David Sullivan, MD, an infectious

...