Sepsis is a condition in which the human body is fighting a severe microbial infection that has spread through the blood stream. Blood sepsis is the leading cause of death of immunocompromised patients, and is responsible for over 200,000 deaths per year in the United States. Present diagnostic techniques take a long time to give a confirmation, are prone to contamination and also are unreliable at low bacterial load. Hence the effectiveness of therapies can be improved if early diagnosis of sepsis is done. This would reduce the microbial load that has to combated, and would hence increase the efficacy of treatment. We aim here at designing and producing a robust centrifugal microfluidic platform for point-of-care diagnosis of blood sepsis. The proposed device would examine blood samples to detect the presence of microbial contaminants; separate, concentrate and finally identify the microbial species, using nucleic acid amplification, to help develop an early and targeted therapy.
Project end date: 01/18/12