STTR Phase I: Rapid Blood Cleansing Device to Combat Infection

The broader impact/commercial potential of this Small Business Technology Transfer (STTR) Phase I project is to develop a dialysis-like platform for selective bacterial separation and removal from blood. This technology could potentially serve as a novel blood cleansing therapy for the treatment of disease, including sepsis. Sepsis, a life threatening organ dysfunction caused by infection, is a condition where the risk of death is extremely high (25%-72%), yet no effective treatments exist. In the US, over 1M people suffer from sepsis annually. Sepsis is the most expensive condition treated in U.S. hospitals, costing more than $20 billion per year. There are currently no approved therapies in the US to treat sepsis. This developing technology will serve as an effective, next-generation sepsis treatment through the direct removal of pathogens and associated toxins from blood. The technology in this project holds many advantages over competitors, including increased effectiveness, hemocompatibility, elimination of pore size limitations, and elimination of clogging issues. Commercialization of this innovation may reduce sepsis-associated length of stay, decrease mortality rates, and potentially reduce the current $23.7B annual US expenditure for sepsis. Fundamental understanding generated by this work has alternative applications, including the development of diagnostic devices for rapid infection detection. The proposed project seeks to leverage the unique properties of a novel, fluidic platform to provide a more effective and rapid method of bacterial and endotoxin removal from circulation for the treatment of sepsis. Sepsis is one of the leading causes of death worldwide and no effective therapy exists for the syndrome. The anticipated research involves 1) scale up of the device for operation at flow rates suitable for humans, 2) developing features for bacteria and endotoxin capture, and 3) evaluation of the rate of bacterial and endotoxin capture from fluid circulating through the scaled-up fluidic platform. It is anticipated that this work will result in a fluidic platform capable of removing pathogens and associated toxins from blood at a clinically translatable flow rate. The goal of this work is to provide an easy to use, cost-effective fluidic platform for separation and capture of bacteria and associated toxins from circulating fluid and to facilitate the use offluidic platforms as research tools. Successful completion of these studies will establish the commercial viability of the fluidic platform and enable the subsequent development of a prototype device for field testing.