[Subjectivist]

A new mechanical Spleen being developed in Boston, MA can filter common sepsis causing diseases right out of your blood including MRSA and Ebola. If it ever gets FDA approval this technology will radically change health outcomes from infectious illness world wide. One five hour treatment removes enough of the disease pathogens for most patients own immune system to complete the elimination without need for antibiotics.

Researchers have developed a high-tech method to rid the body of infections — even those caused by unknown pathogens. 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.

In search of a way to clear any infection, a team led by Donald Ingber, a bioengineer at the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering in Boston, Massachusetts, developed an artificial 'biospleen' to filter blood.

The device uses a modified version of mannose-binding lectin (MBL), a protein found in humans that 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 that trigger the immune overreaction in sepsis.

The researchers coated magnetic nanobeads with MBL. As blood enters the biospleen device, passes by the MBL-equipped nanobeads, which bind to most pathogens. A magnet on the biospleen device then pulls the beads and their quarry out of the blood, which can then be routed back into the patient.

More at link http://www.nature.com/news/artificial-s ... NatureNews

[dissident]

Very good news.

I guess those medieval ignorants were on the right track when they bled patients to get rid of the bad blood

[Tanada]

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.

Ingber says that the biospleen could also help to treat viral diseases such as HIV and Ebola, in which survival depends on lowering the amount of virus in the blood to a negligible level. His group is now testing the biospleen on pigs.

Nigel Klein, an infection and immunity expert at University College London, says that the biospleen could also allow diagnosticians to collect samples of a pathogen from the blood and then culture it to identify it and determine what drugs will best treat it. As blood transfusion and filtration are already common practices, he expects that the biospleen could move into human clinical trials within a couple of years.
Nature doi:10.1038/nature.2014.15917

http://www.nature.com/news/artificial-s ... od-1.15917

[Cog]

That is a very interesting approach and shows a great deal of promise. A mechanical approach if you will to disease. Could you achieve the same thing by doing a total blood volume transfusion?

[Tanada]

That is a very interesting approach and shows a great deal of promise. A mechanical approach if you will to disease. Could you achieve the same thing by doing a total blood volume transfusion?

If the blood being transfused in had the anti-bodies to fight the disease I think a blood exchange might work. Where I see this artificial spleen being most promising is as an adjunct to kidney dialysis. Those patients have very high rates of disease transmitted from the hospital or clinic too themselves simply because life the staff they spend many hours every weeks in a disease rich environment that breeds anti-biotic resistant bugs like MSRA. If they make this thing part of a standard dialysis treatment then the staff who preform those tasks will become familiar with the process and if it is needed to treat an anti-biotic resistant bug in a regular patient they will have the skill base to treat them even if they have normal kidney function. So far as I know dialysis is currently the only regular hospital practice that filters large volumes of blood over periods of hours. A heart lung machine can pump blood and add oxygen while removing CO2, and that would probably be another useful place to install these artificial spleens but those machines are not used with the same kind of regularity as the kidney machines.

[Subjectivist]

Nice to see progress is being made three years later. It is a shame the FDA is so horribly inefficient and slow.