Sepsis may be treatable, according to a new study by ANU researchers published in scientific journal Nature.
For more than a decade, a team of researchers led by the ANU's Professor Christopher Parish, in collaboration with Griffith University chemist Professor Mark von Itzstein, has worked on a drug to treat sepsis.
The drug is intended to stop histones, a family of proteins that provide structural support to chromosomes, from attacking the body. It has passed phase one trials in healthy volunteers, and the next step is another phase one trial with sepsis patients.
Sepsis is responsible for 20 per cent of deaths globally, according to the World Health Organization. The illness occurs when an immune system response to a pathogen begins to attack the rest of the body.
"Normally histones are harmless, packaging DNA within cells, but outside cells they can be very toxic," Professor Parish said.
"Some white cells extrude their histones in net-like structures that entrap pathogens and, via their histones, are very toxic for pathogens."
While histones can protect the body from bacteria, when they bind to the surface of cells and puncture holes into them they are unable to discriminate between pathogens and healthy cells.
Professor Parish hopes the drug will treat the untreatable.
Sepsis survivor Korina Valentine is lucky to be alive after an 11-month battle with the illness, resulting in quadruple amputation.
She said if a treatment for sepsis had beebn available when she fell ill in 2015, she would be living a normal life.
"We were low-key, under-the-radar sort of people getting on with life with young kids," Mrs Valentine said.
"Now that's completely turned upside down."
In the fight against COVID-19, Professor Parish predicts the drug may also help with sepsis-like symptoms in COVID-19 patients.
He is optimistic the new drug will save lives.
"If this drug works as predicted, it should be a game changer in treating sepsis - one of the biggest challenges in 21st-century medicine," he said.
