Are there better treatments for infections with extremely high mortality rates?

Sepsis is a systemic inflammatory response syndrome caused by bacteria and other pathogenic microorganisms invading the body, and the incidence continues to rise.

In addition to routine anti-infection and organ function support, the scientific community is working hard to find novel treatments to save the lives of more sepsis patients

A new study from eLife begins to consider the help of another type of cell, the hematopoietic stem and progenitor cells (HSPCs)

As the precursor cells of immune cells, HSPCs have a more durable self-renewal ability

This led the researchers to consider whether the disorganized inflammation in septic patients could combat the ability of HSPCs

This change may be caused by a surge in cellular workload.

To this end, researchers began to try to save the lives of mice by supplementing HSPCs externally

▲HSPC infusion can significantly improve the survival rate of mice with sepsis (Image source: Reference [2])

However, the infusion of HSPCs did not reduce the number of bacteria in the mice, it reduced the risk of death by producing immune cells to suppress undesirable inflammatory signals

It is worth mentioning that the HSPC infusion method is also protective in the case of streptococcus and influenza virus co-infection, which shows that this method is also effective in the case of severe inflammation, and can reduce the occurrence of "cytokine storm" in general.

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References:

[1] Daniel E Morales-Mantilla et al, Hematopoietic stem and progenitor cells improve survival from sepsis by boosting immunomodulatory cells, eLife (2022).

[2] Stem cell infusion boosts sepsis survival in mice.