MSN: Transforming sepsis care: How host-response technology enables rapid, actionable diagnosis

From the MSN article by Omar Alhassan

Sepsis remains one of the most urgent clinical emergencies in modern healthcare. Each hour of delayed targeted treatment significantly increases patient mortality. For decades, intensive care and emergency clinicians have struggled with the critical challenge of distinguishing sepsis from non-infectious systemic inflammation. Conventional culture tests take days, and traditional inflammatory markers frequently fail to deliver the precision clinicians need at the bedside.

Immunexpress is tackling this diagnostic dilemma with SeptiCyte RAPID, a molecular PCR test that measures the patient’s own immune response to detect sepsis in about an hour. Leading this clinical mission is Chief Medical Officer Dr Roy Davis, whose decades of leadership span neonatal critical care, health system quality, and early warning algorithms. In this executive Q&A, Dr Davis shares his clinical perspective on modern sepsis management, the diagnostic power of host-response technology, and how rapid testing empowers physicians to make timely, confident decisions.

Q: Sepsis diagnosis has historically relied on non-specific inflammatory markers and slow blood cultures. How does measuring the host immune response fundamentally change this diagnostic process?

Dr Roy Davis: A rapid 1-hour host response test to differentiate sepsis from non-infectious systemic inflammation, transforms the clinical workflow for a suspected sepsis patient. By shifting the focus from “finding the bug” to “identifying the patient’s dysregulated immune response it can provide actionable results 24 – 48 hours ahead of a blood culture. The latter also have very low positivity rates (ranging from 15- 42%). While there are several lab tests routinely ordered for a suspected sepsis patient, such as a blood cell count, (CBC), C-reactive protein (CRP) or lactate, these are non-specific biomarkers of infection, inflammation or perfusion respectively. Several studies have demonstrated SeptiCyte RAPID has superior performance to CBC, CRP and lactate to differentiate sepsis from non-infectious systemic inflammation. The transformative power of a highly accurate, fast host response test for sepsis diagnosis is that it can guide clinical decision making during the critical decision window (1-3 hours) for appropriate intervention. Studies show early diagnosis improves clinical outcomes.

Source: MSN.com