Artificial Spleen Removes Ebola, HIV Viruses and Toxins From Blood Using Magnets
53 replies, posted
[img]http://d.ibtimes.co.uk/en/full/1399311/magnetic-nanobeads-binding-pathogens.jpg?w=720&h=301&l=50&t=40[/img][IMG]http://d.ibtimes.co.uk/en/full/1399310/biospleen.jpg?w=720&h=249&l=50&t=40[/IMG]
[QUOTE]BOSTON — Things can go downhill fast when a patient has sepsis, a life-threatening condition in which bacteria or fungi multiply in a patient's blood — often too fast for antibiotics to help. A new device inspired by the human spleen and developed by a team at Harvard's Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering may radically transform the way doctors treat sepsis.
The device, called a "biospleen," exceeded the team's expectations with its ability to cleanse human blood tested in the laboratory and increase survival in animals with infected blood, as reported in Nature Medicine. In a matter of hours, it can filter live and dead pathogens from the blood, as well as dangerous toxins that are released from the pathogens.
Sepsis occurs when a patient's immune system overreacts to a bloodstream infection, triggering a chain reaction that can cause inflammation, blood clotting, organ damage, and death. It can arise from a variety of infections, including appendicitis, urinary tract infections, skin or lung infections, as well as contaminated IV lines, surgical sites, and catheters.
Identifying the specific pathogen responsible for sepsis can take several days, and in most patients the causative agent is never identified. If doctors are unable to pinpoint which types of bacteria or fungi are causing the infection, they treat sepsis patients empirically with broad-spectrum antibiotics — but these often fail in many cases and they can have devastating side-effects. The sepsis treatment challenge continues to grow more complex as the prevalence of drug-resistant bacteria increases while the development of new antibiotics lags.
"This is setting the stage for a perfect storm," said Super, who was part of a team led by Wyss Institute Founding Director Don Ingber, M.D., Ph.D., that also included Wyss Institute Technology Development Fellow Joo Kang, Ph.D., and colleagues from Boston Children's Hospital, Harvard Medical School, and Massachusetts General Hospital.
Kang, who is also a Research Associate at Harvard's School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) and Research Fellow in the Vascular Biology Program at Boston Children's Hospital, set out with the team to build a fluidic device that works outside the body like a dialysis machine, and removes living and dead microbes of all varieties — as well as toxins. They modeled it after the microarchitecture of the human spleen, an organ that removes pathogens and dead cells from the blood through a series of tiny interwoven blood channels.
The biospleen is a microfluidic device that consists of two adjacent hollow channels that are connected to each other by a series of slits: one channel contains flowing blood, and the other has a saline solution that collects and removes the pathogens that travel through the slits. Key to the success of the device are tiny nanometer-sized magnetic beads that are coated with a genetically engineered version of a natural immune system protein called mannose binding lectin (MBL).
In its innate state, MBL has a branch-like "head" and a stick-like "tail." In the body, the head binds to specific sugars on the surfaces of all sorts of bacteria, fungi, viruses, protozoa and toxins, and the tail cues the immune system to destroy them. However, sometimes other immune system proteins bind to the MBL tail and activate clotting and organ damage – so Super used genetic engineering tools to lop off the tail and graft on a similar one from an antibody protein that does not cause these problems.
The team then attached the hybrid proteins to magnetic beads 128 nanometers in diameter — approximately one-five hundredths the width of a human hair — to create novel beads that could be added to blood of an infected patient to bind to the pathogens and toxins without having to first identify the type of infectious agent. The sepsis device then has a magnet that pulls the pathogen-coated magnetic beads through the channels to cleanse the blood flowing through the device, which is then returned to the patient.
The team first tested their blood-cleaning system using human blood in the laboratory that was spiked with pathogens. They were able to filter blood much faster than ever before, and the magnets efficiently pulled the beads – coated with the pathogens – out of the blood. In fact, more than 90 percent of key sepsis pathogens were bound and removed when the blood flowed through a single device at a rate of about a half to one liter per hour, and many devices can be linked together to obtain levels required for human blood cleansing at dialysis-like rates.
Next they tested the device using rats that were infected with E. coli, S. aureus, and toxins –mimicking many of the bloodstream infections that human sepsis patients experience. Quite similar to the tests on human blood, after just five hours of filtering, about 90 percent of the bacteria and toxin were removed from the rats' bloodstream.
"We didn't have to kill the pathogens. We just captured and removed them," Super said. What's more, 90 percent of the treated animals survived compared to 14 percent of the controls — and sure enough, thanks to the team's modified MBL, the immune system had not overreacted.
"Sepsis is a major medical threat, which is increasing because of antibiotic resistance. We're excited by the biospleen because it potentially provides a way to treat patients quickly without having to wait days to identify the source of infection, and it works equally well with antibiotic-resistant organisms," said Ingber, who is also the Judah Folkman Professor of Vascular Biology at Harvard Medical School and the Vascular Biology Program at Boston Children's Hospital, as well as Professor of Bioengineering at SEAS. "We hope to move this towards human testing to advancing to large animal studies as quickly as possible."[/QUOTE]
[URL="http://wyss.harvard.edu/viewpressrelease/166"]http://wyss.harvard.edu/viewpressrelease/166[/URL]
Basically, pump out the blood, bind tiny magnets to the pathogens, pull them out of the blood, and pump the blood back in. It's fantastic that we're getting more alternate ways of dealing with pathogens to just throwing anti-biotics at them, and this looks really promising.
Fucking magnets.
Yeah science!
[media]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7jMlFXouPk8[/media]
[quote]MAGNETS AND MIRACLES[/quote]
not such a bad lyric any more.
Here's a press release from Harvard: [url]http://wyss.harvard.edu/viewpressrelease/166[/url]
Also DARPA awarded the researchers a large grant ($9.25 mil) for further development. This might mean a cure for incurable diseases like HIV might be around the corner soon.
Here's the link to that; [url]http://wyss.harvard.edu/viewpressrelease/108/wyss-institute-awarded-darpa-contract-to-further-advance-sepsis-therapeutic-device[/url]
This sounds revolutionary
If you can't directly fight the virus, just fuckin' remove it from the blood
Technology, FUCK YEAH
That line could have been taken from a scifi book and my reaction would have been the same
holy shit cool
Fucking amazing.
Please god don't be one of those news articles that disappears forever after it gets mentioned once.
[QUOTE=Thunderbolt;46151004]This sounds revolutionary
If you can't directly fight the virus, just fuckin' remove it from the blood[/QUOTE]
It sounds a little bit like a modern version of bloodletting that actually works.
[QUOTE=Empty_Shadow;46151055]Fucking amazing.
Please god don't be one of those news articles that disappears forever after it gets mentioned once.[/QUOTE]
This. Happens all too often.
Fantastic news, imagine this useful for health workers in quarantine environments.
Antbiotics arent used to fight viruses, did they mean anti-viral drugs?
[QUOTE=voltlight;46151069]This. Happens all too often.[/QUOTE]
Keep in mind that medical devices will probably take the better part of a decade more of testing before they even think of putting it into human testing, let alone mass production!
[QUOTE=Jamsponge;46150961]Fucking magnets.[/QUOTE]
How do they work
[QUOTE=Jamsponge;46150961]Fucking magnets.[/QUOTE]
Not just any old magnets; nanobeads, son!
Seriously, this is a pretty cool device. Who'd have thought to whack dialysis up to 11 using magnets AND nanomachines? It's like a piece of medical superscience!
Also, could this work with any form of toxin or hazardous chemical in the bloodstream, not just virally-produced toxins? Can't see why it wouldn't.
Here's hoping for further fruitful testing periods.
[quote]
When antibiotics are used to kill them, dying viruses release toxins in the blood that begin to multiply quickly, causing sepsis, a life-threatening condition whereby the immune system overreacts, causing blood clotting, organ damage and inflammation.[/quote]
What the fuck is this supposed to mean?
You can't use antibiotics against viruses, as they aren't alive in the classical sense of meaning and every toxin and chemical compound gonna axe legit cells before touching the dumb and simple structure of a virus. Furthermore "dying virus" is an oxymoron of it's own, and I never heard of decay of any virus leaving significant amount of any toxin.
Finally, sepsis is indeed potent reaction of the immune system but if you have a problem with a virus, it's probably the immune system reacting to the virus itself, not "toxins".
I don't see how this couldn't work, the design is so simple and pure that there's basically no room for an unforseen error to occur
[quote]The researchers also tested the bio-spleen on rats that had been infected by [B]toxins and viruses such as E. coli and S. aureus.[/B][/quote]
Both E.Coli and S. Aureus are bacterium, who the fuck wrote this shit?
[QUOTE=ironman17;46151204]Not just any old magnets; nanobeads, son!
Seriously, this is a pretty cool device. Who'd have thought to whack dialysis up to 11 using magnets AND nanomachines? It's like a piece of medical superscience!
Also, could this work with any form of toxin or hazardous chemical in the bloodstream, not just virally-produced toxins? Can't see why it wouldn't.
Here's hoping for further fruitful testing periods.[/QUOTE]
Probably, just coat the nanobeads with the proper binding proteins/chemicals of the target toxin/pathogen and let it roll.
[QUOTE=Awesomecaek;46151270]Both E.Coli and S. Aureus are bacterium, who the fuck wrote this shit?[/QUOTE]
Ignore the IBT story, its just a badly rewritten version of the original Harvard article here,
[url]http://wyss.harvard.edu/viewpressrelease/166[/url]
[QUOTE=Awesomecaek;46151270]Both E.Coli and S. Aureus are bacterium, who the fuck wrote this shit?[/QUOTE]
The article is really quite bad, the author has no idea what they're talking about.
[QUOTE=Awesomecaek;46151270]Both E.Coli and S. Aureus are bacterium, who the fuck wrote this shit?[/QUOTE]
these bacteria produce deadly toxins
[QUOTE=AlexConnor;46151315]Ignore the IBT story, its just a badly rewritten version of the original Harvard article here,
[url]http://wyss.harvard.edu/viewpressrelease/166[/url][/QUOTE]
You guys want me to fix to OP to use that article instead?
[QUOTE=fixture;46151321]these bacteria produce deadly toxins[/QUOTE]
The article claims that they are viruses and toxins, which they are not.
[QUOTE=Furioso;46151335]The article claims that they are viruses and toxins, which they are not.[/QUOTE]
Email : [email]m.russon@ibtimes.co.uk[/email]
her email
I will just email her link her the thread here that should do
[QUOTE=Zonesylvania;46150989]Here's a press release from Harvard: [url]http://wyss.harvard.edu/viewpressrelease/166[/url]
Also DARPA awarded the researchers a large grant ($9.25 mil) for further development. This might mean a cure for incurable diseases like HIV might be around the corner soon.
Here's the link to that; [url]http://wyss.harvard.edu/viewpressrelease/108/wyss-institute-awarded-darpa-contract-to-further-advance-sepsis-therapeutic-device[/url][/QUOTE]
Why can I rate this winner only one time?
Fucking magnets
[QUOTE=Mort Stroodle;46151329]You guys want me to fix to OP to use that article instead?[/QUOTE]
Updated the OP, though the actual Harvard article has no references to Ebola or HIV and I can't change the title.
