ROCHESTER, MINN — The Mayo Clinic is in the forefront of a nationwide effort to fight the novel coronavirus with a potential life-saving treatment, and Galion native Chad C. Wiggins, Ph.D. is working under the physician leading the charge.
Dr. Wiggins, a research fellow in the human integrative physiology laboratory at Mayo, is assisting Dr. Michael Joyner, whose team of colleagues is testing and exploring a treatment called convalescent plasma therapy, which uses blood plasma from recovered COVID-19 patients and transfuses it into critically ill ones.
“Mayo has been approved to be the central organizer if you will of all the hospitals in the country,” said Dr. Wiggins, a 2007 Galion High School graduate who has been at the nationally ranked medical center for three years. “This is a nationwide effort, but it started as a grassroots thing and then kind of grew legs.”
The technique, which has been used in the past with SARS and Ebola outbreaks, was done for the first time on a coronavirus patient at Houston Methodist Hospital, but it’s too soon to know the results, according to leading experts monitoring plasma therapy cases.
“Typically, it would take years to get FDA permission to do this, but we’re in the middle of a pandemic so these methods can already be tested,” Dr. Wiggins said. “We gathered a large group of researchers from all over the country, and we found a way to receive necessary approvals to expedite the process.”
Dr. Joyner, an anesthesiologist and physician scientist at Mayo, has been collaborating with Dr. Arturo Casadevall, a microbiologist and immunologist at Johns Hopkins University School of Public Health in Baltimore, Md., to get the program up and running.
Mayo has already taken its first plasma donation, Dr. Wiggins said, and hundreds of donor sites have already been set up around the country. Under Dr. Joyner’s direction, he is coordinating the large group of physicians and hospitals interested in using the treatment as well as getting them registered.
“One of the hardest things for both physicians and patients to do is just to figure out how they’re allowed to use this medical protocol,” Dr. Wiggins said, “and that’s the goal of our group is just to get everyone on the same page and help wherever and whenever we can.”
Dr. Wiggins, who started his post-doctoral fellowship in 2017, said he actually had to turn in his lab coat recently when the Mayo Clinic decided to temporarily halt research and convert its labs to much-needed patient wards. He has been working remotely on his coronavirus role since mid-March and putting in long days.
The son of Scott and LuAnn Wiggins of Galion, Dr. Wiggins earned a bachelor’s degree from Ohio University in 2011. He went on to graduate school at Indiana University in Bloomington, graduating in 2017 with both a master’s degree and doctorate in exercise physiology.
The push now, he said, is for Americans to donate blood, and potential live-saving plasma, which could modify the course of the disease. He especially urged anyone who has had a confirmed case of COVID-19 to reach out to their local Red Cross or blood donation center.
“Again, this is very fast moving. I think in the coming weeks we’ll find out what the nation’s supply is like and if we’ll have enough to use,” he said. “This is going to be a major issue in the U.S. I think we’re going to learn a lot about this treatment very soon.”
For the latest information, visit the National COVID-19 Convalescent Plasma Project’s website at ccpp19.org.