Development of a Novel Rapid Sepsis Point of Care Diagnostic Device

More than 350,000 people suffer from sepsis in the UK annually, leading to 52,000 deaths. Rapid diagnosis is imperative to enable timely administration of interventional antibiotic treatment, however current methods are insufficient to empower clinicians to act within the critical first hour of admission. Early antibiotic therapy is vital to clinical outcomes, with the risk of septic-shock patient mortality increasing by 7.6% with a delay of every 1 hour in antibiotic administration. As recognised by the UK Government and World Health Organisation objectives, there is an urgent unmet clinical need to develop a simple, rapid and accurate test for sepsis, to facilitate fast intervention for patients with bacterial sepsis. Our technology measures levels of the sepsis-specific CRP-VLDL complex biomarker within a handheld, near-patient point-of-care rapid diagnostic, which seamlessly incorporates into the current clinical care pathway.