What is it about?
We used Caenorhabditis elegans, a small, harmless worm, to detect patients who had blood infection. The worms were attracted to urine from patients who had blood infection, compared to urine from healthy participants, in as early as 20 minutes
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Why is it important?
Sepsis or blood infection detection is very difficult and depends very much on doctors' experience and laboratory tests. These tests do not always give correct results; and some tests takes hours to days to obtain results. The CESDA test could identify sepsis patients in 20 minutes and could be further explored for sepsis diagnostics.
Perspectives
We had fun doing this research as it was a "crazy" idea to test. We read before that worms are attracted to smell of urine from cancer patients, and wondered if the worms will also be attracted to urine from sepsis patients as well. We think infection and cancer might share some similar pathways, which cause attraction of the worms.
Hui-min Neoh
Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Rapid Detection of Sepsis using CESDA: the Caenorhabditis elegans Sepsis Detection Assay, Revista da Sociedade Brasileira de Medicina Tropical, March 2019, FapUNIFESP (SciELO),
DOI: 10.1590/0037-8682-0300-2018.
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