Small magnets in the fight against blood poisoning

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If someone has sepsis, every second counts. Rashes of fever shake the patient, his respiratory and cardiac output increases. Shortly after, the blood pressure drops, the kidneys fail, later the lungs, the heart and the brain. In Switzerland alone, about 18,000 people suffer from blood poisoning each year and, according to the World Health Organization (WHO), there are 30 million people worldwide. Up to 30% of those affected die. The triggers for such a shock reaction are bacteria, viruses or fungi – which is exactly what a lab test shows, but that lasts up to twenty hours. Time that the patient does not have. After only a few hours, there is a risk of death

. In most cases, doctors immediately administer antibiotics. However, these only kill bacteria. They can not harm viruses and fungi. And: The more antibiotic excess is prescribed, the more it promotes the formation of resistant bacteria. However, doctors had no choice but to administer antibiotics to these patients. "We must not risk death because we waited too long," says Andreas Widmer, infectious disease specialist at Basel University Hospital

. Biomedicine researchers at Hemotune start-up are working on a solution to this dilemma. They have developed magnetic nanoparticles to rid the blood of toxins. Such toxins occur because in the case of blood poisoning, the immune system reacts excessively.

Clinical studies only planned

The principle of washing the blood: Outside the body, the poisoned blood circulates in a machine with two chambers. In the first chamber are called magnetic particles. They are only thirty nanometers small – a nanometer is a millionth of a millimeter – and coated with a special carbon coating. The toxins dock there. In the second chamber, a magnet pulls the nanospheres from the blood, and with them also the toxins.

At least in experiments with mice, the procedure worked: After forty minutes, the nanomagnets had removed 75 percent of all toxins from infected rodents. Even laboratory experiments with human blood have been successful. If the procedure succeeds in the future also in humans, this gives the Intensivstation doctors sufficient time to determine the exciters of blood poisoning and to find the right active substance . By 2020, Hemotune plans to be ready to conduct the first human clinical trials.