New method could lead to faster sepsis diagnosis

A new method developed by Korean researchers could reduce the turnaround time of sepsis tests, improving patient outcomes.

Sepsis, a dysregulated immune response brought on by an infection, is one of the leading causes of death globally. Patient-specific treatment can be developed using antimicrobial susceptibility testing; however, this typically takes 2–3 days owing to the need for a blood culture sample, which requires physicians to use a broad spectrum of antibiotics in the meantime.

Finding ways to reduce the turnaround time associated with antimicrobial susceptibility testing is crucial to decreasing the risk of death from sepsis and reducing the unnecessary use of antibiotics.

To tackle this, Sunghoon Kwon and colleagues from Seoul National University, Korea, have developed an ultra-rapid antimicrobial susceptibility testing method, which uses a sample of whole blood and reduces the need for culturing.

A synthetic peptide is used to recover a broad range of pathogens directly from the blood, which are then identified and tested for drug susceptibility. The authors suggest that this approach has the potential to reduce the turnaround time of the test by more than 40–60 hours compared to existing commercial methods. The findings have been published in Nature.

The method was validated in a clinical setting in 190 hospitalised patients, achieving a 100% match rate in species identification. In a retrospective analysis of six positive cases, the average turnaround time of the test was approximately 13 hours from initial blood processing, the authors said.

However, further clinical validation is needed within a diverse cohort to verify the findings, according to the authors. These results suggest this method has the potential to reduce both the time taken to tackle sepsis and the amount of unnecessary antibiotics used during broad spectrum treatment, the authors said.

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