A way to spot sepsis quickly

Sometimes, after an infection, the body's immune system goes rogue, turning itself on its own organs and tissues, resulting in a life-threating condition called sepsis . Pinpointing the bacterial culprit and the right antibiotic treatment for sepsis can take a harrowing 2–3 days. "You need to find the optimal therapeutic as soon as possible," says Tae Hyun Kim, a research scientist at the California Institute of Technology. Kim and his colleagues developed a testing method for sepsis that reduces the turnaround time from collecting a blood sample to finding the right treatment to about 13 h ( Nature 2024, DOI: 10.1038/s41586-024-07725-1 ) . "Our objective was to make this into a commercial device that could be used to help patients," says Kim, who did the work as a postdoctoral scholar in the lab of Sunghoon Kwon , a biomedical engineer at Seoul National University. Because pathogens in the blood are