New approach to severe bacterial infections and sepsis
Bacterial infections that don’t respond to antibiotics are of rising concern, as is sepsis — the immune system’s last-ditch attack on infection that ends up being lethal itself. Reporting in Nature, researchers at Harvard-affiliated Boston Children’s Hospital describe new potential avenues for controlling both sepsis and the runaway bacterial infections that provoke it. Sepsis kills a quarter million people each year in the United States and is the largest killer of newborns and children worldwide. Like antibiotic-resistant infections, it has no good treatment. Through scrupulous experiments, scientists in Boston Children’s Program in Cellular and Molecular Medicine (PCMM) have uncovered the final cellular events necessary for both sepsis and stemming the bacterial attack. Recent research has shown that at any sign of bacterial invasion, protein complexes called inflammasomes are activated. This activation triggers a process called pyroptosis — the infected cells explode open, releasing bacteria as well as chemical signals that sound an immune alarm. But...