Paediatric hospital Children's Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP) said on Tuesday that the results from convalescent plasma appearing to be a safe and effective for children with life-threatening cases of COVID-19 were published online by the journal Pediatric Blood and Cancer.

To date, no therapies have been proven safe and effective for children who develop life-threatening complications from contracting the SARS-COV-2 virus.

The hospital added that the study is the first report of convalescent plasma in children with life-threatening COVID-19 and involved researchers in a wide variety of disciplines, including immune dysregulation, transfusion medicine, infectious disease, occupational health, critical care, hematology, oncology, immunology, and rheumatology. The study involved four patients with acute respiratory distress syndrome.

In the four patients that were studied, the use of convalescent plasma was not associated with antibody-dependent enhancement, in which antibodies developed during a previous infection cause a worsened response with subsequent infections, a concern that has been described in preclinical models of other coronaviruses. Additionally, convalescent plasma did not suppress endogenous antibody response.

Though, the small study shows the convalescent plasma is safe to use in paediatric patients with COVID-19, a larger, randomized trial is also needed to validate the research, concluded the company.