We may soon have a faster test for sepsis

Embargoed until: Publicly released: 2024-07-25 01:00

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Sepsis diagnoses may soon be found faster as Korean researchers say they have created a new method for identifying the pathogens that are involved in sepsis cases. Sepsis is a dysregulated immune response that follows an infection in the body, and is one of the leading causes of death across the globe, say the authors. Currently, the tests for the condition take between two and three days due to needing to do blood culture samples, and the researchers say they can reduce the turnaround time by over 40 to 60 hours. Their method uses a synthetic peptide to recover a broad range of pathogens directly from the blood, which then can be identified and tested for drug susceptibility. They say that, in their tests on 190 patients who were hospitalised with suspected infections, they achieved a 100% match rate for finding the species, and in the six positive cases, the turnaround time was approximately 13 hours.

Media release

From: Springer Nature

A faster test for sepsis

A new method for identifying the pathogens involved in sepsis cases, which could help to select optimal therepeutics, is reported in Nature this week. The test has the potential to reduce the turnaround times normally associated with developing treatments for infections and may improve patient outcomes.

Sepsis, a dysregulated immune response brought on by an infection, is one of the leading causes of death, globally. Patient-specific treatment can be developed using antimicrobial susceptibility testing; however, this typically takes 2–3 days owing to the need for a blood culture sample, which requires physicians to use a broad-spectrum of antibiotics in the meantime. Finding ways to reduce the turnaround time associated with antimicrobial susceptibility testing is crucial to decreasing the risk of death from sepsis and reducing the unnecessary use of antibiotics.

Sunghoon Kwon and colleagues present an ultra-rapid antimicrobial susceptibility testing method, which uses a sample of whole blood and reduces the need for culturing. A synthetic peptide is used to recover a broad range of pathogens directly from the blood, which are then identified and tested for drug susceptibility. The authors demonstrate that this approach has the potential to reduce the turnaround time of the test by more than 40–60 hours compared to existing commercial methods. The authors validated their method in a clinical setting, enrolling 190 hospitalized patients with suspected infections. Their method achieved a 100% match rate in species identification. In a retrospective analysis of six positive cases, the average turnaround time of the test was approximately 13 hours from initial blood processing.

The authors note that further clinical validation is needed within a diverse cohort to verify the findings. However, these results suggest this method has the potential to reduce both the time taken to tackle sepsis and the amount of unnecessary antibiotics used during broad-spectrum treatment.

Journal/
conference: Nature

Research:Paper

Organisation/s: Seoul National University, Seoul, Korea

Funder: This work was supported by the Ministry of Science and ICT of the Republic of Korea and the National Research Foundation of Korea (nos. NRF- 2020R1A3B3079653 and NRF-2020R1A2C1007242), the BK21 FOUR programme of the Education and Research Program for Future ICT Pioneers (Seoul National University, 2022), Bio-MAX Institute (Seoul National University), K-BIO KIURI Centre (no. 2020M3H1A1073304), QuantaMatrix Inc., Korea Disease Control and Prevention Agency (no. 2022-ER2207-00) and the SNUH Research Fund (grant no. 03-2020-0440).

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