In a potential paradigm change for sepsis diagnostics, a new test predicted sepsis soon after infection in mice — well before blood clotting and organ failure — enabling early antibiotic treatment and markedly increased survival. The findings provide a platform to develop rapid and easy-to-perform clinical tests for early sepsis detection and clinical intervention in human patients.

The collaborative effort by a research team including scientists from UC Santa Barbara, UC San Diego, and Sanford Burnham Prebys Medical Discovery Institute (SBPMDI) is detailed in a new study(link is external) published in the Lancet journal, eBioMedicine. The team succeeded in detecting a catastrophic shift in blood protein abundance soon after infection that can predict sepsis well before disease symptoms and organ damage arise.

The project was led by professor Michael Mahan(link is external) of UC Santa Barbara, along with professors Dzung Le of UC San Diego, and Jeffrey Smith and Jamey Marth of SBPMDI. Additional collaborators include UCSB scientists Douglas Heithoff and Scott Mahan, as well as SBPMDI scientists Genaro Pimienta and Won Ho Yang, and University of Sydney veterinarian scientist John House.