Completed Public Health & Healthcare Digestion, Kidneys & Other Organs

Disruptive diagnostic for bacterial infection directly from whole blood in patients with SEPSIS

In plain English

AI plain-English summary

Sepsis patients die while doctors wait days for blood culture results to identify the infection. The SepsiSTAT platform skips the culture step entirely, detecting bacteria and their antibiotic resistance directly from a patient's blood sample in hours instead of days. This matters because sepsis kills quickly, and the current standard of care forces clinicians to guess which antibiotics to use. Broad-spectrum antibiotics are often sub-optimal, can harm some patients, and their overuse drives antimicrobial resistance—a growing global threat. Previous attempts at direct-from-blood testing have failed to deliver a credible alternative to blood culture. If SepsiSTAT succeeds, it could transform how sepsis is managed in hospitals. Instead of waiting days for a diagnosis, clinicians would have actionable results within hours, allowing them to target antibiotics precisely to the pathogen. This would improve patient survival, reduce unnecessary antibiotic use, and make hospital care more efficient. The platform addresses a critical bottleneck in infection management—the diagnostic delay that currently forces treatment decisions to be made in the dark.

View original technical description
Sepsis is the leading cause of hospital death with ~700K EU deaths annually. To treat a sepsis infection, we must identify the causative pathogens and determine their antibiotic susceptibility. However, existing blood culture testing is slow (days) and sepsis kills quickly (hours). Clinicians therefore initiate treatment with broad-spectrum antibiotics. These are sub-optimal and can be harmful to some patients. Initiation of treatment without diagnostic results also leads to overuse of antibiotics, impacting antimicrobial resistance. Many have sought to address this challenge using direct from-blood (DfB) test methods, but have failed to address the real market need. SepsiSTAT is the world’s first DfB diagnostic platform able to deliver a credible alternative to blood culture testing, but with results in hours and not days. This enables a rapid targeting of antibiotic treatments with improved patient outcomes, greater healthcare efficiencies and reduced antibiotic use.

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Related Research

Grants with similar aims, by meaning.

Rapid Point of Care Sepsis Diagnostic Platform
Rapid determination of negative blood cultures
Rapid detection and categorisation of organisms from whole blood in cases of sepsis
PROMPT SEPSIS : Partnership for Rapid On-site Microfluidic POC Test for Sepsis ¬¬¬
SEPSIS Alert Test

Original classification

EU-Funded

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