Sepsis: is this a breakthrough?

Sepsis is often referred to as the ‘silent killer’ and with good reason. It affects around 250,000 people in the UK each year, with hospital patients being at a particularly high risk. If sepsis is not swiftly detected it can rapidly lead to organ failure and death. In fact an estimated 52,000 people in Britain die of sepsis annually.

But the condition is notoriously hard to diagnose. Typical symptoms include fever, chills, nausea, a rapid pulse rate, and diarrhoea, all of which are also signs of less serious ailments. So it is all too easy for sepsis sufferers to slip through the net and remain untreated - until it is too late.

Scientists have been working tirelessly over the past few years to develop new ways of diagnosing the condition. And in December 2021 there came a breakthrough.

Imperial Research announced that it had created a new digital alert system capable of monitoring at-risk patients for a range of infection responses. Common sepsis markers such as body temperature changes and fluctuations in heart rate can be assessed via the system. Health workers are then automatically alerted when a patient’s symptoms show signs of requiring further investigation.

While the digital alert tool is still in the development stage, it has been associated with a 24% reduction in deaths during trials involving sepsis patients. This development spells promising news. And it is just one of a series of new breakthroughs designed to improve sepsis diagnosis and treatment.

In September 2018 the NHS launched a ‘Suspicion of Sepsis Dashboard’ tool that provides staff with an overall picture of hospital admissions. This gives an indication of how far sepsis interventions are improving patient outcomes while also helping staff to assess the scale of the problem at local, regional and national level.

In 2020, researchers at the Laboratory of Bionanophotonic Systems at EPFL's School of Engineering developed an optical biosensor designed to reduce the time required for diagnosing sepsis from a number of days to just a few minutes. The portable device works by rapidly detecting sepsis biomarkers in a patient's bloodstream. And also in 2020, researchers at Ohio State University discovered that Injecting patients with genetically-edited

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