Treating life-threatening sepsis with personalised immunotherapy - ImmunoSep poject

Gloria is a doctor at a large European hospital.

She has lost many patients to sepsis: a serious, often life-threatening, complication caused by infectious diseases.

She heard that sepsis is now one of the most common causes of death for hospitalised patients in European countries, and affects around 50 million people worldwide each year.

Gloria did some more research into the problem and found several publications that established treatment options, such as the prescription of antibiotics and the introduction of intensive care units, have already reduced the number of people dying from sepsis.

Even so, many people with sepsis still die.

She was, however, encouraged when she learnt that improving patients’ own defensive immune response using immunotherapy could further reduce the number of deaths.

The scientists of the European research project, ImmunoSep, want to be pioneers in the treatment of sepsis through the introduction of personalized immunotherapy, challenging the current ‘one-size-fits-all’ approach.

An overreacting or under-reacting immune response plays a critical role in the physiology of sepsis, yet manifests very differently in individual patients.

For this reason, the ImmunoSep precision-medicine approach has great potential to save many more patients.

ImmunoSep investigates the utility of personalised immunotherapy to help doctors like Gloria improve outcomes for sepsis patients.

The team is conducting immunoprofiling on patient’s cells and blood to analyse individuals’ differing immune health using cutting-edge technologies such as single-cell sequencing, genomics and epigenomics, metabolomics and analyses of the microbiome.

The insights will inform the design and execution of future precision medicine-based immunotherapy trials and produce a pipeline of theranostics: diagnostic tests working alongside this immunotherapeutic regimen in managing sepsis.

Eventually, these novel immunotherapeutic treatments will be introduced to our health systems, benefitting not only Gloria's patients but many more around the world.