The first rapid test to identify bacterial infections in blood through immune activity

Sepsis is a disease that affects 30 million patients and kills 6 million of them, which is approximately one death every two minutes, more than from prostate cancer, breast cancer and AIDS combined. The 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, they are complex to diagnose and too often identified too late.

In this context, the SEPTIBELL proposal arises with the intention of developing a rapid sepsis detection system. Its main objective is to digitise, in a quantitative and automatic way, lateral flow immunoassays with the intention of detecting sepsis after the first hour of bloodstream infection. Specifically, a mobile reading solution and a state-of-the-art point-of-care desktop reading device have been developed to quantify the level and severity of an infection using Deep Tech technologies.

LoopDx, ColorSensing, Draco Systems, Stimulo Design and the Fundació Institut d’Investigació i Innovació Parc Taulí (I3PT-CERCA) together with secpho, collaborate to develop this novel automatic colorimetric reading system called SEPTIBELL that uses lateral flow strips to identify bacterial infections in blood through immunological activity.

The project has been a beneficiary of Next Generation EU funds channelled by the Ministry of Industry, Trade and Tourism within the programme to support Innovative Business Groups, which aims to digitise industry.

In June we will present it to the secpho ecosystem through an informative session, in which the terms of the research and the results obtained in this project will be made known.