Harvard University has launched a new startup, intent on using an external device to clean the blood of patients with sepsis.
Opsonix Inc. was launched today thanks to a worldwide exclusive licensing agreement between the company and Harvard’s Office of Technology Development. The company will progress the device into clinical trials thanks to Series A funding led by Baxter Ventures.
"We are developing an entirely new approach to treat sepsis that directly and quickly eliminates the pathogens and toxins that trigger the sepsis cascade,” said Wyss Institute Founding Director Dr. Don Ingber, who is also a vascular biology professor at Harvard Medical School and Boston Children's Hospital and bioengineering professor at Harvard. “Even more importantly, we can accomplish this without having to first identify the infectious agent.”
Pathogen-induced sepsis, characterized by a whole body response to an infection, affects at least a million people every year in the U.S. — more that prostate cancer, breast cancer and AIDs combined.
Of those, 30 percent are fatal. Yet the way to currently treat sepsis is limited to antibiotics and intravenous fluids, which present problems when the source of the infection is an antibiotic-resistant bacteria or the disease is progressing too rapidly.
But researchers from the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard University, led by Ingber and Michael Super, have created a type of cartridge, similar to what is used in dialysis treatment, to clean the blood of patients with sepsis.
Funded by over $22 million from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, researchers first genetically engineered a protein that is able to latch on to an array of infectious invaders.
The proteins are usually used in the body to funnel pathogens to the immune system’s clearance apparatus.
In proof of concept tests, results of which were published in Nature Medicine, the team attached the augmented protein to nanoscale magnetic beads.
When the beads were exposed to a magnetic field in a device that mimics the spleen, the beads were able to clean the blood. In septic rats, the device was able to rapidly cleanse the animal’s blood, suppressing the inflammatory cascade reaction to the infection and helping prolong the rat’s survival.
But researchers were concerned that the magnetic beads might be carried back into a patient’s circulation, and so the proteins were attached to the inner surface of hollow fibers, similar to those used in FDA-approved mechanisms for dialysis therapy.
In results published in Biomaterials, the device in combination with antibiotics reduced pathogens in the blood and helped stabilize vital signs more effectively than antibiotics alone.
The process also sped up the extraction of pathogens and reduced the amount of the protein needed to clean the blood.