Sepsis is a disease that affects 30 million patients and causes the death of 6 million of them, which is approximately one death every two minutes, more than from prostate cancer, breast cancer and AIDS combined. This disease is a life-threatening condition caused by the body’s inflammatory response to infection. While these are infections that could be treated with antibiotics, it has a complex diagnosis and is too often identified late.

In this context, the SEPTIBELL proposal arises with the intention of developing a rapid sepsis detection system. Its main objective is to quantitatively and automatically digitize lateral flow immunoassays with the intention of detecting sepsis after the first hour of bloodstream infection. Specifically, it aims to develop a mobile reading solution and a state-of-the-art “point-of-care” desktop reading device to quantify the level and severity of an infection using Deep Tech technologies.

Notably, septic patients suffer from excess inflammation for 1-2 hours leading to a phase of immune compromise; the project’s approach explores how the immune system responds to a specific invading pathogen, which can determine infection 10 times earlier than bacterial identification techniques such as blood culture, and 50% more accurate than methods directly on blood.

This innovative diagnostic system will help emergency physicians make better clinical decisions and optimize sepsis management. In this way, SEPTIBELL aims to become the gold standard for the identification of bacterial infections in blood through immunological activity, activating the Sepsis Code.

The developed device will be able to determine infection 10 times earlier than bacterial identification techniques such as blood culture and will be 50% more accurate than methods directly in blood.