When a patient has sepsis, a life-threatening condition in which
bacteria or fungi multiply in the blood, things can become rapidly life
threatening. A new technological device has been designed that is
inspired by the human spleen. It has been developed by a team at
Harvard’s Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering and the
new device may radically alter the way medical professionals treat
sepsis.
The device is called a “biospleen” and it has gone way beyond the
team’s initial expectations with the ability to cleanse human blood.
The apparatus was tested in the laboratory and has increased the
survival rates in animals with infected blood, as reported in
Nature Medicine.
In only a relatively short period of time, the device can filter dead
and live pathogens from the blood, as well as filtering dangerous
toxins, which are released from the pathogens.
At least 8 million people worldwide each year are killed from Sepsis.
It is the leading cause of hospital deaths. Michael Super, senior staff
scientist at the
Wyss Institute
said, “We need a new approach.” “Even with the best current treatments,
sepsis patients are dying in intensive care units at least 30 percent
of the time.”
Sepsis occurs when a patient’s immune system overreacts to a
bloodstream infection, thereby triggering a reaction which can cause
inflammation, blood clotting, organ damage, and eventually death. The
issue can arise from a variety of infections, including appendicitis and
urinary tract infections, as well as from surgical equipment such as
contaminated IV lines and catheters.
Super, who was part of the team led by Wyss Institute Director Don
Ingber that also included Wyss Institute Technology Development Fellow
Joo Kang and colleagues from the Harvard-affiliated Boston Children’s
Hospital and Massachusetts General Hospital, and Harvard Medical School.
Kang, who is also a research associate at Harvard’s School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (
SEAS)
and a research fellow in the Vascular Biology Program at Boston
Children’s Hospital, started with the team to construct a fluidic
device, which works outside of the body like a dialysis machine,
removing living and dead microbes of different variants, as well as
toxins. The team modelled the Biospleen after the micro-architecture of
the human.
The biospleen is a microfluidic device, which is made up of two
adjacent hollow channels that are connected to each other by a series of
slits. One channel contains flowing blood and the other channel has a
saline solution, which collects and removes the pathogens that traverse
across the slits. The key to the success of this new device are tiny
nanometer-sized magnetic beads that are coated with a genetically
engineered version of a natural immune system protein called
mannose-binding lectin (MBL).
Ingber, the Judah Folkman Professor of Vascular Biology at Harvard Medical School and the Vascular Biology Program at
Boston Children’s Hospital,
as well as professor of bioengineering at SEAS, said, “Sepsis is a
major medical threat, which is increasing because of antibiotic
resistance. We’re excited by the biospleen because it potentially
provides a way to treat patients quickly without having to wait days to
identify the source of infection, and it works equally well with
antibiotic-resistant organisms…We hope to move this towards human
testing to advancing to large animal studies as quickly as possible.”
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SOURCE:
http://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2014/09/wiping-out-sepsis/
