< Back to all news

In brief: COVID-19 and mitigation strategies

Apr 15, 2021 – With the COVID-19 pandemic, research centers were temporarily closed or partially closed, several sites participating in multicenter clinical trials reaffected their staff to patient care and enrollment in non-COVID-19 research was stopped in the ongoing trials. Considering the call and the expectation from CIHR and CFI funded scientists to help with the rapid research response, and the expertise of our team in acute care research, the team was temporarily redirected to COVID-19 research. Dr. Turgeon received CIHR funding as a principal investigator ($2.2M) to evaluate the use of convalescent plasma within the REMAP-CAP international adaptive platform trial, as well as therapeutic anticoagulants in the same platform with his colleagues R. Zarychanski (University of Manitoba) and E. Goligher (University of Toronto). This important research effort led to observe that convalescent plasma does not improve clinically significant outcomes in non-selected critically ill COVID-19 patients. On the other end, anticoagulants are useful in increasing organ support-free days and decreasing mortality in moderately ill patients (ward patients on oxygen). The results of this important work have been submitted for publication.

Donation