Sepsis treatment technology developed

PHILADELPHIA, Oct. 30 (UPI) -- U.S. and British researchers have created a technology they say can significantly improve the treatment of sepsis.

Sepsis, which kills 1,500 people worldwide daily, occurs when proteins are released by the immune system in response to infection and create an intense state of systemic inflammation that damages healthy tissue and can lead to organ failure.

Sepsis can be treated by hemofiltration, but the efficiency of treatment is limited by the filter material. The most popular filter material is activated carbon, but most of the pores in activated carbon are too small and only a small fraction of the surface area is available for adsorption.

The scientists at the University of Drexel in Philadelphia and at Britain's University of Brighton have developed a method that allows the creation of carbon adsorbents with the desired size of pores.

"The beauty and power of our technology is its ability to fine-tune the carbon microstructure and pore size to target a specific application," said Yury Gogotsi, director of the Drexel Nanotechnology Institute and a co-inventor of the technology with a Brighton team led by Sergey Mikhalovsky.

The research appears in the December issue of the journal Biomaterials.