How to diagnose systemic infections much more quickly and reliably

To date, there are no methods that can quickly and accurately detect pathogens in blood to allow the diagnosis of systemic bloodstream infections that can lead to life-threatening sepsis. The standard of care for detecting such blood-borne infections is blood culture, but this takes days to complete, only identifies pathogens in less than 30% of patients with fulminant infections, and it is not able to detect toxic fragments of dead pathogens that also drive the exaggerated inflammatory reactions leading to sepsis. (A full story can be found at the Wyss Press Release website.)

The paper was published in eBiomedicine, which is a newly launched medical journal supported by Cell Press and Lancet.