Innovative Method for Treating Sepsis

By using a simple cascaded channel design, the blood also undergoes a two-stage bacteria removal in a single pass through the device, thereby allowing higher bacterial removal efficiency.

“The developed technique offers significant advantages including high throughput and label-free separation, which allows nonspecific removal of any blood-borne pathogens,” concluded Han Wei Hou, PhD, of the MIT department of electrical engineering and computer science. “The continuous processing and collection mode could potentially enable the return of filtered blood back to the patient directly, similar to a simple and complete dialysis circuit setup.”
In an experiment with the prototype device, the researchers demonstrated highly efficient removal of the bacteria Escherichia coli (80%) and the yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae (90%), as well as a greater than 80% depletion of inflammatory cellular components. The researchers also designed and tested a larger blood cleansing system, consisting of six microfluidic channel networks in parallel. They are also conducting a small-scale animal test to validate the efficacy of the technique in vivo.

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