Sepsis, sometimes referred to as blood poisoning, is a life-threatening condition that arises from the body’s response to an infection or injury. Sepsis is a major medical challenge and is the most common cause of death in hospital Intensive Care Units – implicated in 1 in 20 deaths in the population as a whole and up to 50 percent of all hospital deaths. There is a critical need for new therapies to treat sepsis, which can affect people at any stage of life without warning.
A pre-clinical study in a rodent model of pneumonia-induced sepsis was performed under Cynata’s development partnership with RCSI (the Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland), under the leadership of Professor Gerard Curley, Chair of the Department of Anaesthesia and Critical Care at RCSI, and Consultant in Intensive Care Medicine at Beaumont Hospital, Dublin. This partnership was co-funded by Cynata and RCSI under the RCSI Strategic Industry Partnership Seed Fund. In this preclinical model of severe sepsis, Cymerus MSC treatment:
The extent of each of the above benefits was statistically significant in comparison to a placebo control while positive trends were also observed in a preclinical model of mild pneumonia-induced sepsis.
Cymerus MSCs were also shown to enhance phagocytosis, both directly and indirectly. Phagocytosis is the process by which white blood cells ingest and remove bacteria and other harmful agents from the body.