A new artificial spleen, similar to a dialysis machine, can save patients dying from bloodstream infections. Meanwhile, wearable devices gather valuable medical data on diabetes and Parkinson’s disease patients. Every week brings new innovations in medical technology that could save lives and improve patient care. The latest are a table-top device that acts like a human spleen, filtering bacteria and viruses out of the blood, and two health tracking smartphone apps for people with type 1 diabetes and Parkinson’s disease. Check Out Last Week’s Gadget Report »

Take That, Sepsis: Meet the New ‘Biospleen’ In a paper published September 14 in Nature Medicine , scientists from Harvard University’s Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering discuss their newest medical device: an artificial spleen, or “biospleen,” that filters bacteria and other pathogens from the bloodstream. The device could be particularly useful for patients with sepsis, which occurs when an infection spreads in the bloodstream and triggers a powerful immune system response. More than 18 million people a year experience sepsis, and even in state-of-the-art medical facilities, 30 to 50 percent of them die, 6 million of them children in the developing world, the researchers said. Read More: What Is Sepsis? » Doctors currently treat sepsis with antibiotics, which don’t work well if doctors don’t know the exact type of pathogen the patient is infected with. “When sepsis occurs, things can go downhill fast. In the later stages of sepsis every hour delay in giving the correct antibiotic therapy increases the mortality by 5 to 9 percent,” said Michael Super, senior staff scientist at the Wyss Institute and co-investigator on the study, in an interview with Healthline. “Because the biospleen works on such a wide spectrum of pathogens, you do not need to know what organism is causing sepsis.” Photo courtesy of Harvard’s Wyss Institute. Even if antibiotics do kill a large percentage of the bacteria, the patient’s blood becomes filled with dead bacteria, which fuels the immune system response. The biospleen has an answer for that, too. Super’s team genetically engineered a protein called mannose binding lectin (MBL), which sticks to sugars found on the surface of bacteria, fungi, and other pathogens (but not on human cells). They attached MBL to magnetic nanobeads small enough to circulate in a patient’s bloodstream. Using a technique similar to dialysis, the biospleen removes the patient’s blood, mixes it with the modified MBL beads, and runs the blood past a magnet. The beads stick to the live and dead pathogens and are collected by the magnet, cleansing the patient’s blood before it is returned to their body. “We are not injecting the MBL protein into the patient. Instead we are taking the blood out of the patient and removing pathogens in real-time and returning the cleansed blood to the patient,” said Super. “Unlike the other (failed) sepsis therapies, we are focusing on removing the live and dead pathogens and pathogen-associated toxins from the bloodstream.”