Pathologists Fighting COVID-19 - Houston Methodist

ASIP is proud to share some of the recent advancements made by Drs. Eric Salazar and James M. Musser in COVID-19 patient treatment using convalescent serum therapy at Houston Methodist. The physician scientists in this program have now infused 11 critically ill patients with plasma donated by recovered, now healthy, COVID-19 patients.

Under the leadership of Drs. Eric Salazar and James M. Musser, PI, Houston Methodist was the first academic medical center in the country to begin collecting donated plasma and infusing patients as part of a national consortium of hospitals investigating this experimental therapy. The news has gone around the world.

30 gravely ill Texas patients who underwent experimental COVID treatment are now recovered
More than 30 gravely ill patients who took part in an experiments treatment for COVID-19 at Houston Methodist Research Institute have recovered from the illness and have left the hospital, the physician overseeing the therapy said Friday. “All of these people were very, very sick,” Dr. James A.

The group’s cutting edge research has been submitted to various high profile peer-reviewed journals and also available on pre-print servers to guide clinical researchers globally and to coordinate worldwide efforts to combat this pandemic:

Molecular Architecture of Early Dissemination and Evolution of the SARS-CoV-2 Virus in Metropolitan Houston, Texas
We sequenced the genomes of 320 SARS-CoV-2 strains from COVID-19 patients in metropolitan Houston, Texas, an ethnically diverse region with seven million residents. These genomes were from the viruses causing infections in the earliest recognized phase of the pandemic affecting Houston.

James M. Musser, MD, PhD is the immediate Past-President for the Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology (FASEB) and a Past-President of the American Society for Investigative Pathology (ASIP). He currently serves as Chair of the Department of Pathology and Genomic Medicine and the Director of the Center for Molecular and Translational Human Infectious Diseases Research at Houston Methodist. Dr. Musser was the recipient of the 2017 ASIP Rous Whipple Award, the 2007 ASIP Chugai Award for Excellence in Mentoring and Scholarship, and the 1999 ASIP Outstanding Investigator Award.