European researchers demonstrate thirty minute sepsis detector

Sepsis, a deadly reaction to infection, is thought to kill more than 20,000 people a day worldwide. Whilst rapid detection of the condition is critical to effective treatment, current detection techniques can take hours or even days to produce a diagnosis.

The new system, developed by the EU-funded RAIS consortium, which includes researchers from Spain, Switzerland, Germany, Belgium, the UK and Italy uses light to look for specific biomarkers that are as small as few nanometres in size, or 1/1,000,000^th of the thickness of a single human hair.

During operation, a small blood sample is taken from a patient’s thumb or forefinger and is separated in a centrifuge so that a clinician can examine the plasma, the part of the blood sample where all the proteins are contained.

The plasma sample flows over a microarray, a collection of tiny spots containing specific antibodies on a nanostructured gold slide. Two light beams are then shone through the full microarray, with one of them passing through the sample, while the other one goes through the clear part of the slide, acting as a ‘reference’.