Sepsis, or blood poisoning, is a major health care problem, killing more people than cancer and occurring more commonly than heart attacks. While much is still unknown about the condition, researchers from Korea's Institute for Basic Science (IBS) have come up with a reliable new treatment which involves strengthening blood vessels.
When the immune system overreacts during an infection and starts attacking itself, sepsis occurs. Consequently, blood vessels weaken first and become porous, causing vascular leakage that results in a number of complications such as severe inflammation, pulmonary edema, organ damage and death. As sepsis is incurable, the best that doctors can do is to address the underlying infection and make the patient strong enough to fight it off on their own.
The new treatment that IBS researchers have developed activates a receptor found on blood vessel lining known as endothelial cells. The researchers induced a growth factor protein known as Tie2, which promotes growth in blood vessels through the use of an anti-angiopoietin-2 (Ang2) antibody known as Ang2-binding and Tie2-activating antibody (ABTAA).
Ang2 is hard to detect under normal circumstances but under stressful conditions, such as in an infection, the antibody is produced in bulk and circulated in the bloodstream, which leads to the death of vascular cells and makes blood vessels porous. ABTAA deters vascular cell death and blood vessels porosity by causing the antibody to mesh together, turning it inert so it can't cause damage, as well as stimulating Tie2 production to strengthen blood vessels.
When ABTAA is combined with antibiotics, survival rates for severe sepsis go by up to 70 percent.
"In the past, treating sepsis meant fighting off the underlying infection but the immune system still attacked itself and people still died," said Seung Jun Lee, one of the authors of the study.
Aside from addressing sepsis, the researchers believe that ABTAA can be used in other ways, such as alleviating heart attacks. They also see the antibody as having a possible role in curing life-threatening infections caused by the Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS) and Ebola viruses.
The study is published in the Science Translational Medicine journal.
Photo: Mat Marschalko | Flickr
