
A surgeon's frustration with diagnostic limitations inspired a new technology to harness the information from the immune system to combat a public health emergency – sepsis.
Sepsis is a public health emergency. It precedes half of all inpatient deaths. It's also the number one source of malpractice claims and injuries to patients and misdiagnosis.
Tim Sweeney, MD, PhD, co-founder and CEO of Inflammatix
The TriVerity test is a blood test that looks at 29 mRNAs from the patient's immune system in blood… And from that we have algorithms on the device that estimate the risk of a bacterial infection.
Tim Sweeney, MD, PhD, co-founder and CEO of Inflammatix
We've relied on QIAGEN Genomic Services to do the RNA sequencing work on many samples collected for our research... [while] PAXgene stabilizes the RNA expression levels in the tube of blood. And we're reading those RNA expression levels.
Tim Sweeney, MD, PhD, co-founder and CEO of Inflammatix
The fact that there's this separate severity score really allows us to identify the risk of progression and help make better decisions beyond just is there an infection.
Tim Sweeney, MD, PhD, co-founder and CEO of Inflammatix
References:
1. Sweeney TE, et. al. A comprehensive time-course–based multicohort analysis of sepsis and sterile inflammation reveals a robust diagnostic gene set. Sci. Transl.Med. 2015;7: 287ra71-287ra71. DOI:10.1126/scitranslmed.aaa5993
2. Sweeney TE, et. al. Robust classification of bacterial and viral infections via integrated host gene expression diagnostics. Sci. Transl. Med. 2016; 8: 346ra91 DOI: 10.1126/scitranslmed.aaf7165
3. Sweeney TE, Perumal T, Henao R, et. al. A community approach to mortality prediction in sepsis via gene expression analysis. Nat Comms 2018; 9: 694 DOI:10.1038/s41467-018-03078-2
February 2025