Antibiotics are widely used to fight infection. Now research finds magnets may also help treat blood infection. Magnetic iron particles, when put into a person's blood, bind to bacteria and then they were removed from the blood by using magnets. Blood poisoning is a condition that bacteria that cause infection enter the bloodstream. Half of all cases are deadly but timely treatment may successfully cure it. So the most important thing is to get immediate treatment. In order to rapidly control the condition, clinicians generally give antibiotics to people who are suspected to have blood poisoning. Sometimes their disease is not caused by bacteria. The use of antibiotics does not fight the disease and what's worse it may trigger antibiotic resistance. Fast and efficacious therapies are in urgent need to replace antibiotics. A team led by researchers at Empa in St. Gallen, the Adolphe Merkle Institute and the Harvard Medical School has recently found an alternative method to treat blood poisons. In the method, the magnetic purification of blood is involved. Iron particles coated with antibody specific to bacteria can bind to specific bacteria in the bloodstream. Then the iron-pathogen complexes are removed magnetically. One obstacle needs to be overcome is that current techniques can only coat iron particles with antibodies that recognize a species of bacteria. Actually blood poisoning may be caused be multiple bacteria species. So first of all it is needed to identify the identities of bacteria. But the process costs a lot of time, which may delay treatment. Gerald Pier and colleagues have developed an antibody that is capable of recognizing all blood poisoning-causing bacteria. It can accelerate magnetic treatment, allowing it to be used in the future. But there is a way to go to use the method on humans. The team will try to elucidate the efficacy of the antibody. CusAb offers HRP conjugated antibody.
