Dive Brief:
- A new venture launched by Harvard University, Opsonix Inc., is developing an external device that cleans the blood of patients with sepsis in a process akin to dialysis treatment.
-
The device comes from researchers at the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard University, under the guidance of Founding Director Dr. Don Ingber and Michael Super.
- The company is set to enter the device into clinical trials with the backing of Series A funding from Baxter Ventures.
Dive Insight:
The treatment could be a game changer in healthcare, considering pathogen-induced sepsis impacts at least a million U.S. patients annually, which is more than prostate cancer, breast cancer and AIDs combined, the Boston Business Journal notes, and more than 30% of those cases are currently fatal.
"We are developing an entirely new approach to treat sepsis that directly and quickly eliminates the pathogens and toxins that trigger the sepsis cascade,” Ingber announced. “Even more importantly, we can accomplish this without having to first identify the infectious agent.”
The device has already showed it can rapidly clean the blood of septic rats and help prolong their survival. Together with antibiotics, it stabilized vital signs better than antibiotics alone.