By the bioMérieux Connection Editors
bioMérieux helped champion efforts to bring sepsis awareness to the community with participation in this year’s Sepsis Tech & Innovation Conference: Inspiring Breakthroughs in Care, hosted by Sepsis Alliance. Under the advisement of nearly 60 diversified thought leaders, attendees were presented with valuable knowledge on the effects sepsis has on patients, how socioeconomic and political status can impact patients, and what tactics may lead to better treatment and prevention.
The Severity of Sepsis
Sepsis is the body’s extreme immune response to an infection is it unable to fight. Most commonly caused by bacteria, sepsis impacts the lives of 1.7 million adults in the United States each year. Sepsis is often deadly: 1 in every 3 individuals who die in a hospital have sepsis.
Sepsis also carries a substantial socioeconomic burden, as noted in the conference’s opening session. According to Critical Care Medicine 2020, the annual healthcare costs of sepsis in the United States reach $62 billion.
The Role of Diagnostics in Fighting Sepsis and Antimicrobial Resistance
One of bioMérieux’s experts, Christine Ginocchio, PhD, MT (ASCP), Senior Vice President of Global Medical Affairs at bioMérieux/BioFire Diagnostics, served as a panelist in a discussion to shed light on the role innovative diagnostics can play in prevention and patient treatment. Ginocchio’s session reviewed assay biological pathways, sepsis progression, and a breakdown of how the immune system is triggered when battling sepsis. Early detection of sepsis using timely diagnostic data may help provide us with the power to guide treatment for better patient outcomes.
It is also important to consider the effects that antimicrobial resistance (AMR) has on sepsis. AMR limits the availability of effective antibiotics, which can make it difficult to find antibiotics to fight sepsis or infections that may lead to sepsis.
Looking to the Future of Sepsis Prevention and Care
The mission of the Sepsis Tech & Innovation annual conference is to help take the costly guesswork out of sepsis diagnosis and care. As Steven Q. Simpson, MD, Professor of Medicine at University of Kansas, stated in his session regarding innovation, we must reframe our thinking as we look to the future and “change from threshold-based, dichotomous thinking to a continuum-based concept of sepsis.”
According to Simpson, we have a unique opportunity to harness the effects of COVID-19 for guidance in the fight against this illness because severe COVID-19 is classified as sepsis.
While the challenges we face with this deadly condition are many, innovation from thought leaders, raising public awareness, and investment in next-gen technologies can help us advance.
For more information regarding the event, visit the Sepsis Tech & Innovation Conference page.
Opinions expressed in this article are not necessarily those of bioMérieux, Inc.
