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News Feature: The quest to solve sepsis

Researchers are learning more about the baffling, deadly condition. Treatments are elusive, but one thing’s for certain: timing is everything .

At first, it looked like the flu. So doctors in Tolima, Colombia, advised Olga Pena’s 70-year-old father to rest and get plenty of fluids. Three days later, the elder Pena was sicker than ever. His skin stretched taut over swollen limbs and abdomen, and his fever raged on. Even as physicians in the local hospital labored to control his symptoms, he suffered heart attacks and organ failure. A little more than a week after he first got sick, Augustin Pena died of sepsis with his daughter by his side.



Researchers investigating sepsis—a serious life-threatening condition that often sends sufferers to the hospital—believe they are starting to see ways to get ahead of this fast-moving killer. Image courtesy of Shutterstock/Chaikom.



It was 2003, and as one way of coping with her loss, the then-23-year-old with an undergraduate degree in bacteriology tried to learn everything she could about the fast-moving syndrome that had killed her father. She found that this very abnormal response to an infection is nevertheless disturbingly common. There are now upward of 30 million sepsis cases a year worldwide, with 6 million deaths, and those figures are probably vast underestimates, experts say (1).

Sepsis is always an emergency, but it’s hard to identify with any certainty. “There’s no gold standard test, no X-ray, no lab test, no biopsy, no anything,” says critical care physician and researcher Clifford Deutschman of the Feinstein Institute for Medical Research. Fifteen years ago, scientists couldn’t even agree on what sepsis was. Without a solid understanding of what causes this disastrous cascade of body system failures, Pena knew that researchers couldn’t find reliable methods to diagnose or treat sepsis.

Much has changed since …