Sepsis diagnosis can take up to five days, wasting crucial time needed to treat the infection, but researchers at Pennsylvania-based Penn State and California-based Stanford University are working to change that with the development of a two-hour diagnostic blood test, according to a Oct. 28 statement from Penn State. The National Institutes of Health gave the universities a five-year, $3.8 million grant for the project.
Existing sepsis diagnostic methods typically require several days to allow the bacteria responsible for the infection to multiply to detectable levels in the blood sample.
"Our approach bypasses this step and identifies fungal and bacterial pathogens at the single-cell level," Pak Kin Wong, PhD, professor at Penn State and co-principal research investigator said in the statement.
This method will also identify how resistant individual pathogens are to antibiotics, according to researchers.