During this health emergency, in which Kedrion Biopharma is engaged in the fight against COVID-19 and is focusing its efforts on the use of "convalescent plasma," the Company will make an unconditional contribution to support the streaming video event, scheduled for Thursday, April 16, entitled "The Gift of the Cured Versus the Pandemic. Plasma and Antibodies in the Challenge against Coronavirus," organized by the online newspaper, DonatoriH24.
The event will be a remote round table meeting – as the rules call for at this time – that will include a discussion between four top Italian experts in this field: Alessandro Gringeri, Chief Medical and R&D Officer of Kedrion; Giancarlo Maria Liumbruno, Director of the Italian National Blood Center; Massimo Franchini, Director of the Transfusion Service of the Carlo Poma Hospital in Mantua and Gianpietro Briola, National President of AVIS.
The meeting, which will be moderated by Luigi Carletti, Director of DonatoriH24, will also feature a speech by Prof. Steven Spitalnik, of Columbia University in New York, who has just activated the protocol for the donation and use of convalescent plasma and who is strongly committed to the search for tests and procedures that can optimize and make this approach universal.
The use of Covid-19 convalescent plasma donated in Italy has recently been authorized by the Ministry of Health, which has issued a memorandum prescribing a series of very precise guidelines (recommendations). A few days prior to this, the Food and Drug Administration issued a similar authorization in the United States. However, China was the first country to test this therapy against Covid-19, based on past experience acquired in various regions of the world in tackling the SARS and Ebola epidemics.
With the aim of explaining how plasma donation is a fundamental resource in the fight against many diseases and epidemics, including the Coronavirus, whose effects can be seen every day all over the world, the participants of the round table will discuss and explore current issues, including how and where convalescent plasma can be used in the fight against Covid-19, what the hopes and expectations are for its use, and whether it can also be used in prevention, and how immunoglobulins can be developed as a drug therapy.
These are just some of the topics that will be addressed during this live-stream event which is scheduled to start at 7:00 p.m. on Thursday, April 16, at www.donatorih24.it.
