CytoSorbents Corporation (CTSO)

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Global threat to humanity

Doctors around the world celebrate on September 13, the World Day sepsis - and have for the first time hope of healing: A new medical technology can stop the deadly disease.


As Mariana Bridi was 20, admitted shortly after Christmas in a Brazilian hospital, she looked amazing and she was still relatively good. She had elevated temperature, and the doctors diagnosed the top model an infection of the urethra, nothing earth-shattering. Then, within days, her condition worsened dramatically, the doctors lost control. The kidneys failed, hands and feet began to die. In emergency surgery her limbs, the kidneys and a portion of the stomach were amputated away - too late. End of January, the supermodel died from sepsis to German: blood poisoning.

That was in 2009, and since then more than 130 million people worldwide are suffering from sepsis, nearly 45 million have died from the debilitating disease, including many celebrities. The sepsis-victims include Prince Rainer of Monaco, Superman actor Christopher Reeves, publisher Rudolf Augstein, Chancellor Schmidt's wife Loki and the TV presenter Ilona Christen.

Sepsis is the leading cause of death of children and neonates, the overall infection rate increases per year by about ten percent. The National Academies of Sciences of the G-states are already warning of a "global threat to humanity". On September 13 physicians from around the world celebrate the World sepsis therefore Day to make to cases such as that of Bridi and the largely unknown and underestimated disease attentive.


Complex overreaction of the immune system


Calls for Germany calls Professor Konrad Reinhart, chief of the Department of Anesthesiology and Intensive Care Medicine at the University Hospital Jena and Chairman of the German Sepsis Foundation, by the federal government a "National Action Plan against sepsis". In the Federal Republic of cancer every year approximately 180,000 people suffer from sepsis, more than 60,000 die - more than by heart attack together or lung, breast and colon cancer. Reinhart believes that a combination of better hygiene measures, vaccination against sepsis pathogens, reconnaissance and other measures can reduce the morbidity and mortality significantly.

Sepsis is a complex overreaction of the immune system to bacteria or fungi, which is so strong that vital body functions are limited, and one or more organs fail. It occurs as a consequence of infection or after major surgery. The defense system of the body produces in the case of an infection called cytokines that coordinate as messengers the entire defense. If the amount of cytokines a certain values, proposes to the defensive struggle: Institutions are no longer protected but harmed.

In the past there have been several attempts to get at the disease by pharmaceutical or medical therapies. But success came from modest or completely. Only now there's a promising new approach that could save the lives of many sufferers.

The small U.S. company Cytosorbents from New Jersey has developed a cytokine adsorbent that removes the dangerous messengers and other inflammatory mediators from the blood: the blood of an infected person is passed through a 20 cm long cylinder, stuck in the tens of thousands of small plastic balls. They are made of highly biocompatible polymers, each of them is perforated with countless tiny holes remain in which hanging the unwanted molecules. So living dangerously high cytokine levels are reduced to a level at which the body's runaway immune response can control himself again. "We," says Christian Steiner, head of Cytosorbents Europe, "give the doctors an instrument in the hand to regain control of these patients and thus save lives."

In eleven states of the cytokine filter is already used. In Germany spend more than 40 clinics the cartridge successfully, therapy belongs in the Munich University Hospital Grosshadern and Augustinum for certain patients already as routine as at the University Hospital of Essen, Greifswald and Halle. In more than 20 studies, the effectiveness of the adsorber is being studied closely - and there are the first results very promising. The decisive factors in the use during long operations seem to be two facts to be: inflammatory mediators such as interleukin 6 are effectively reduced, and the effect persists postoperatively, which suggests that the adsorbent exerts an influence on the production of interleukins.


Private online medium for new technology


Whether a 60-year-old who suffered a streptococcal infection after a forearm fracture and was saved thanks to the adsorber, or a 37-year-old man who suffered a staph infection after liver cirrhosis and convalesced - the results of the new form of therapy are consistently positive .

As fast growing insights into the cytokine-adsorber that Professor Frank Brunkhorst, director of the Center for Clinical Studies at the University Hospital Jena and Secretary General of the German Sepsis Society, in cooperation with the manufacturer created its own online media for the new technology: In Cytosorb register , users can capture common data centers to use which document safety and efficacy.

Side effects that exist in almost all forms of therapy have so far occurred nowhere. Although it can not be excluded that the small polymer beads also substances from the blood to get that there are desirable - for example, antibiotics that are administered to a bacterial infection. Which could meet, however, by the doctors increase the dose of the drug. The relevant data for this purpose are currently collected in several studies.

"Enormous potential in combating sepsis" therefore sees the senior physician in the Department of Intensive Care Medicine at the University Hospital Hamburg Eppendorf, Axel Nierhaus. Professor Karl carrier, director of the cardiac intensive care unit of Universtätsklinikums Ulm, who proved to be one of the first heart specialists, the reduction of inflammatory mediators through the adsorber, notes, Cytosorb was a "promising new treatment option" and have "greatest benefit".

What is exactly is still difficult to discern. As the Eppendorf intensivists Nierhaus recently got a suicidal patients on his ward, who had swallowed an overdose of the painkiller acetaminophen, it was no longer pump the stomach. The active ingredients of the drug had already paralyzed the liver. Nierhaus put the cytokine filter - and rescued the man and life liver.


http://www.welt.de/wissenschaft/gesundheitstipp-des-tages/article132242798/Globale-Bedrohung-der-Menschheit.html

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