The lab-made spleen was successfully used to remove as much as 90% of the pathogens present in the blood of rats

Sep 15, 2014 20:03 GMT  ·  By

A paper published in the journal Nature Medicine this past September 14 details the engineering of a so-called artificial spleen that promises to treat several diseases by removing pathogens from blood.

This lab-made spleen is the brainchild of a team of researchers led by Donald Ingber with the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering in Boston, Massachusetts, and proved most efficient when used to treat rats.

The artificial spleen's anatomy

This man-made spleen is basically a device that packs loads of nanobeads, i.e. beads that are freakishly small and, therefore, invisible to the naked eye. The beads are all coated with a protein dubbed mannose-binding lectin (MBL, for short).

As detailed in the journal Nature Medicine, this protein is naturally occurring in humans. It has the ability to bind not just with 90 different bacteria, viruses and fungi, but also with the toxins that pathogens release into the body.

Here's how the artificial spleen works: blood is pulled into the device, and forced to pass by the MBL-coated nanobeads. During this process, the pathogens present in it get captured. When the nanobeads are removed, so are the viruses, fungi, bacteria and toxins. Once cleaned, the nanobeads are returned to the spleen, and the cycle begins all over again.

“Blood flowing from an infected individual is mixed with magnetic nanobeads coated with an engineered human opsonin—mannose-binding lectin (MBL)—that captures a broad range of pathogens and toxins without activating complement factors or coagulation.”

“Magnets pull the opsonin-bound pathogens and toxins from the blood; the cleansed blood is then returned back to the individual,” the scientists who created this innovative device detail its working principles in the Abstract to their paper.

The rats experiments

As mentioned, this device has until now only been tested on laboratory rats. During this series of experiments, the artificial spleen was found to be well capable of removing over 90% of the pathogens present in the rodents' blood, Nature informs.

The result was that, some 5 hours following infection, about 89% of the rats in the group treated with the help of this device were still alive. By comparison, a survival rate of just 14% was documented in the case of rats in the control group.

What's more, the specialists behind this research project say that the laboratory rodents fitted with the artificial spleen had less inflammation in their body, which is an indicator that they were less likely to develop sepsis, i.e. potentially fatal whole-body inflammation triggered by severe infection.

The artificial spleen also proved well capable of cleaning human blood. Thus, Donald Ingber and colleagues successfully used it to remove most of the bacteria and fungi present in 5 liters of blood taken from human volunteers. Whatever pathogens remained were few enough for the immune system and antibiotics to be able to deal with.

Potential uses for the artificial spleen

Writing in the journal Nature Medicine, specialist Donald Ingber and fellow researchers argue that their device could serve to treat infections with pathogens ranging from Escherichia coli, which causes severe food poisoning, and Ebola, a deadly virus that is now wreaking havoc in West Africa.

Interestingly enough, the artificial spleen could be used to treat human patients regardless of whether or not doctors have managed to pin down the exact pathogen causing ill health. This is because the device does not need to be told which threats to hunt down, and instead removes whatever pathogens come its way.

Photo shows MBL-coated nanobeads binding to Escherichia coli (left) and Staphylococcus aureus (right)
Photo shows MBL-coated nanobeads binding to Escherichia coli (left) and Staphylococcus aureus (right)

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Artificial spleen removes pathogens from blood
Photo shows MBL-coated nanobeads binding to Escherichia coli (left) and Staphylococcus aureus (right)
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