(605g) Microfluidic Blood Cleansing Device for Sepsis Therapy

Sepsis is a major killer of man because a high microbial load in blood overcomes even the most powerful existing antibiotic therapies, resulting in multi-systems failure. This is a particularly significant problem in premature infants and immunocompromised patients with fungal infections since antibiotic therapies are dose-limiting. Development of an extracorporeal blood cleansing device that can rapidly clear the blood of pathogens without removing normal blood components could help remedy this problem. We have developed a prototype microfluidic-micromagnetic blood cleansing device that rapidly clears relevant fungal pathogens from flowing human whole blood with high efficiency and throughput. This device is composed of an array of microfluidic channels fabricated from poly-dimethylsiloxane. Magnetic opsonins were created by coating 1-micrometer superparamagnetic microbeads with pathogen-specific antibodies. Using this device, we have selectively removed nearly 80% of living fungal pathogens from a continuously flowing stream of heparinized human whole blood (20 ml/hr/device) in a single pass. We are now working to further enhance throughput and adapt our system for continuous in vivo testing in a rabbit sepsis model. The future of our work is to develop this new therapeutic platform microtechnology into a highly useful point-of-care medical device for both civil and military applications. (Funded by CIMIT)