SerpApi.Org
Despite the best efforts of intensive care unit (ICU) staff and physicians and the most advanced life support, Dr. Bryan Yipp, witnesses many deaths in the ICU attributed to sepsis. "Sepsis is the body's overwhelming immune response to an infection, and sometimes that response can cause death," says Yipp, a critical care physician and clinician-scientist at the Cumming School of Medicine. "While many cases involve people with long-term illnesses, seemingly healthy people can be at work or home one moment and then, within hours, be admitted to the ICU."
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Earlier this year, 41-year-old NASCAR race champion Kyle Busch died after pneumonia progressed to sepsis. Yipp says a recent discovery in his lab, published in Science, could lead to new treatments for this often-fatal condition.
Tracking the deadly cell swarms
When someone is septic, their immune cells cluster together, clogging the circulatory system and reducing or stopping blood flow. When that happens, organs begin to fail. Researchers analyzed the clustering behavior by combining two well-known scientific techniques.
"We saw immune cells carry out complex swarming behaviors like bird murmurations. Just like the aerial ballet performed by a flock of birds, the synchronization of the cells was powerful and mesmerizing. But then we wondered, how are we going to make any sense out of it?" says Yipp, the principal investigator on the study.
"We developed a new method of combining microscopy with digital informatics to create something we coined cellular behavioromics."
Turning images into behavior data
Instead of treating the cellular images like pictures, the team noted each cell's features, including its shape and size, the speed at which it moved and the direction it took. Researchers then assigned numbers to those features and started feeding that data into a bioinformatics pipeline.
"Our approach enabled us to sort out the cells. We found 18 different clusters of behaviors involved in the cellular swarms during sepsis," says Dr. Luke Brown, Ph.D., first author of the study. "Understanding cell behavior can provide insight into new treatments, including when to administer the treatment."
A drug already on hand
Yipp says the new understanding prompted his team to look at treatment options at varying intervention points that could prevent cells from clustering.
"The findings allowed us to propose targeted therapeutics to block bad host responses and allow good host responses to improve survival during sepsis," says Yipp. "Currently, the gold-standard treatment for sepsis is to administer antibiotics within an hour of deciding that someone is septic. We wondered whether an additional medication used in conjunction with the antibiotics would be beneficial."
Findings from the research, conducted in mice, showed promising results. A well-known, safe asthma medication prevented certain cells from clustering. Yipp says that while there is still much investigation to do, the fact that sepsis affects and often kills millions of people worldwide each year, like Kyle Busch, shows the real-life importance of using innovative computational biology to discover new therapeutics.
More information: Luke Brown et al, Visualizing a lung neutrophil-platelet immunothrombosis cascade during sepsis in mice, Science (2026). DOI: 10.1126/science.adv0377
Provided by University of Calgary
This story was originally published on Medical Xpress.
