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John Lemke

Artificial spleen cleans up blood : Nature News & Comment - 0 views

  • A device inspired by the spleen can quickly clean blood of everything from Escherichia coli to Ebola, researchers report on 14 September in Nature Medicine1.
  • Blood infections can be very difficult to treat, and can lead to sepsis, an often-fatal immune response. More than 50% of the time, physicians cannot diagnose the cause of an infection that has prompted sepsis, and so they resort to antibiotics that attack a broad range of bacteria2. This approach is not always effective, and can lead to antibiotic resistance in bacteria.
  • To test the device, Ingber and his team infected rats with either E. coli or Staphylococcus aureus and filtered blood from some of the animals through the biospleen. Five hours after infection, 89% of the rats whose blood had been filtered were still alive, compared with only 14% of those that were infected but not treated.
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  • the device had removed more than 90% of the bacteria from the rats' blood.
  • The researchers then tested whether the biospleen could handle the volume of blood in an average adult human — about 5 litres. They ran human blood containing a mixture of bacteria and fungi through the biospleen at a rate of 1 litre per hour, and found that the device removed most of the pathogens within five hours.
  • That degree of efficacy is probably enough to control an infection, Ingber says. Once the biospleen has removed most pathogens from the blood, antibiotics and the immune system can fight off remaining traces of infection — such as pathogens lodged in the organs, he says.
    • John Lemke
       
      In short, it remove enough pathogens to be an effective human treatment.
John Lemke

Sticky Nanobeads Can Strip Bacteria, Viruses From Blood - D-brief | DiscoverMagazine.com - 0 views

  • Bioengineers at Harvard’s Wyss Institute have developed a blood filter that quickly grabs toxins, such as E.coli or Ebola, from the bloodstream using protein-coated nanobeads and magnets. In early tests, the biomechanical treatment removed more than 90 percent of toxins from infected human blood within a few hours.
  • dubbed an “artificial spleen,” instead mechanically clears pathogens from the bloodstream, thereby reducing reliance on heavy doses of antibiotics. Its trick lies in magnetic nanobeads coated with a modified human protein. This protein binds to sugar molecules on the surfaces of more than 90 different bacteria, viruses and fungi, as well as to the toxins released by dead bacteria.
  • Researchers then tested their device by cleaning 5 liters of human blood spiked with a variety of pathogens. The device cleared blood at a rate of 1 liter per hour, and again removed over 90 percent of the pathogens.
John Lemke

Genetically engineered white blood cells could be the future of HIV treatment | The Verge - 0 views

  • Scientists have successfully modified the white blood cells of 12 patients living with HIV, making their cells resistant to the retrovirus and improving the study participants' overall ability to fight off infection. The researchers achieved this result through a gene editing technique, described today in
  • Unlike the child who went into HIV remission a year ago, the patients in this study continue to test positive for HIV. But the results of this Phase I clinical trial still represent a promising debut for HIV treatments involving tailored gene therapy, as the white blood cells persisted for nearly a year after transfusion.
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