Biomarkers for rapid diagnosis of paediatric sepsis

Grant ID: EMLE-265R40-2023-HARLEY

Project Summary

Sepsis is a time critical medical emergency that arises when the body starts to attack its own tissues and organs in response to an infection. Sepsis can result in organ dysfunction, multi-organ failure and death if not treated promptly, and is a leading cause of death in children worldwide. Sepsis often presents with non-specific signs common to many mild infections, making it difficult to detect early and accurately, leading to delaying appropriate treatments and resulting in severe sepsis. Therefore, it is vital to identify new approaches to rapidly identify the type of infection and predict the severity of the condition in patients presenting with suspected sepsis to enable early initiation of appropriate treatments.

Recent advances in genomic technologies have shown that gene expression based infection testing has the potential to provide much faster and more precise results. This results in more accurate diagnosis of infections and appropriate timely treatments. Our study will utilise an advanced gene expression analysis approach named single-cell RNA sequencing to identify new approaches for sepsis diagnosis. This could lead to development of a rapid testing method which can predict the type of infection (bacterial or viral) and the severity of the condition with a quick turnaround time for results, improving patient outcomes, reducing unnecessary antibiotic use, and shortening hospital length of stay.


SHARE

Amount Awarded
$99,924


Program


Grant Scheme


Status
Active


Principal Investigator:
Dr Amanda Harley


Co Investigators:
Dr Devika Ganesamoorthy
Dr Sainath Raman
Dr Natalie Phillips
A/Prof Kristen Gibbons
Prof Lachlan Coin
Prof Luregn Schlapbach
Dr Prem Venugopal


Institution


Collaborating Institutions


CONTACT US +61 7 3112 8668 info@emfoundation.org.au Suite 1A 34 Sherwood Road Toowong, Qld 4066