Sepsis screening could hold key to early diagnosis

A new screening process could identify sepsis in the blood within two hours. King's College London researchers have identified a biomarker for blood sepsis, which can be screened from a blood sample and return with a diagnosis in as little as two hours.

Sepsis is a form of blood poisoning that can be fatal. It occurs when the body reacts to bacterial infection in such a way that it damages its own organs and tissues. The condition is a problem that is rife in the UK and ends up killing more people than both bowel and breast cancer. In order to successfully treat the condition, fast diagnosis and treatment is needed. However, there is currently no biomarker screening process in use to identify it quickly and it can take around two days for laboratory tests to confirm it.

In order to allow for the speedy diagnosis of sepsis, researchers began looking for a possible biomarker that could identify it quickly. Blood samples were taken from three patient groups; those that were healthy, another group that had sepsis and a third group that had Systemic Inflammatory Response Syndrome - which does not respond to antibiotics. 

Researchers amplified RNA - which regulates and helps to decode DNA - in order to see which microRNAs also increased. It was found that one specific group of microRNAs were less active in other groups than they were in the samples taken from sepsis patients. 

The study was validated when it was replicated on a group of Swedish patients that had severe sepsis. It was found that sepsis could be identified using this screening method with 86 per cent accuracy within a two-hour time frame. 

Professor Graham Lord, director of the National Institute for Health Research Biomedical Research Centre at Guy's and St Thomas' NHS Foundation Trust at King's College London, said: "We have for the first time identified a group of biomarkers in the blood that are good indicators of sepsis. We have shown that it is possible to detect these markers by screening a patient's blood in the ward, a process which can deliver results within two hours. 

"This is an extremely exciting development which has the potential to completely transform the management of this severe disease and save thousands of lives worldwide every year. These are promising early findings, and now we need to test this approach in a large clinical trial."