 CLIFTON LEAF: Gianrico, you've been sort of organizing and running this enormous consortium devoted towards convalescent plasma which, if you think about it, it's like a poor man's vaccine. Talk a little bit about that. GIANRICO FARRUGIA: Sure, thank you. So convalescent plasma, as you just mentioned, is not new. It's been around for 100 years. In fact, probably the first time it was used was in the Spanish flu pandemic 1918, so literally 102 years ago for pneumonia, which is very similar to what we're trying to use it for now. And it just builds on the fact that when you will recover from an infection, you have antibodies and you can-- sometimes those antibodies are neutralizing in which case you can use them to help fight the disease. So we set up, with a lot of help, this large consortium. The FDA was remarkable. And I think it approved in just a few days. And now it's set around the country. There are over 30,000 people that have already received convalescent plasma. You mentioned it's a poor-- go ahead. CLIFTON LEAF: I just [INAUDIBLE] find out some results from that study. GIANRICO FARRUGIA: So that's really important, because we had the first show which was safe, that has been shown. Now, as you mentioned, we have to show how does it work. There are already signs it works. The question now is-- who does it work for? How early do you have to give it? Do you give it once? Do you give it twice? And then use that as a stepping stone to hyperimmunoglobulin, and use that to then as a stepping stone to the next recombinant or the monoclonal antibody. And that would give us a nice stepping stone until the vaccines come, which, of course, is where we all want to be. We know we cannot simply wait for a vaccine. And that is where I would argue as what we've learned and the health care system now has to absorb is the fact that we have to be so much more agile. We have to work with partners-- IBM, others-- to be able to create this ecosystem where we can recycle old drugs. And remdesivir is not a known drug, but it's not a new one either, where we can recycle products like convalescent plasma, but also be able to input into the system at a much faster s new ways of approaching these pandemics. CLIFTON LEAF: And Paul, you also have that compute consortium that, again, speaking about these ecosystems. Talk a little bit about how that's focused on COVID-19. PAUL ROMA: Yeah. So we, early on, put together all of the supercomputers and provide that to the researchers across the globe. We have hundreds of universities, companies like Mayo, Cleveland Clinic and others that are all running experiments and creating findings from the supercomputers put together. And they're doing, just as Gianrico said, they're looking for new indications, the safe use of drugs within severe cases and medium severity cases. And the initial research has been fantastic. What would have taken weeks to model and run in a standard and traditional computing environment can literally be done in minutes. And the number of cycles you can run, you can get months worth of modeling and worked done in as course of a day. 

How convalescent plasma is being used to fight COVID-19

Health

 Dr. Gianrico Farrugia and Paul Roma join Brainstorm Health.

The Mayo Clinic’s Dr. Gianrico Farrugia and IBM’s Paul Roma join Fortune’s Brainstorm Health.
