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▲ Graphic image showing blood purification technology using blood cell membrane nanomagnetic particles (Photo/Data provided_UNIST) © Patent News |
Technology has been developed to cleanly remove the causes of infectious diseases such as viruses from a patient’s blood. It is a technology that can remove more than 99% of multi-drug resistant bacteria and 135 different types of bacteria present in human feces. It is also possible to extract coronavirus variants from the blood.
Professor Joo-Heon Kang’s team in the Department of Biomedical Engineering at UNIST has developed a ‘blood cell membrane magnetic nanoparticle’ which covers the surface of magnetic nanoparticles with a blood cell membrane. By reacting these particles to a patient’s blood circulating outside the body, pathogens such as bacteria or viruses can be captured and recovered with a magnet. The surface of red blood cells or white blood cells has the ability to protect the human body by trapping pathogens, and ‘functional magnetic nanoparticles’ were created using this.
If the ‘blood purification technology using blood-magnetic cell membrane nanoparticles’ developed this time is combined with the treatment of sepsis or secondary bacterial infection in the intensive care unit, the therapeutic effect is expected to be great. In particular, as the number of infections with secondary antibiotic-resistant bacteria in the intensive care unit increases, it can be of great help in the treatment and management of critically ill patients hospitalized for COVID-19.
Excessive immune responses, such as sepsis and cytokine storms, can lead to death. Antibiotics, antiviral drugs and vaccines have already been developed to counter this, but it is difficult to cope with the emergence of super bacteria, the side effects of antibiotics, and even new pathogens such as Corona 19. That is why an effective and universal treatment is needed for urgent infectious diseases.
The treatment developed by Professor Joo-Heon Kang’s team is ‘effective and universal’ because it removes pathogens from the blood using the properties of blood cell membranes and magnetic nanoparticles. When the blood magnetic membrane nanoparticles circulate in a patient’s blood circulating outside the body and capture pathogens, they are pulled out by magnets and released from the body, so anyone can apply any pathogen . In this way, the research team found that multi-drug resistant bacteria and viruses, the main causes of infection, are captured by substances derived from the cell membranes of red blood cells and white blood cells coated on surface of magnetic nanoparticles, and interact with them. opsonins in the blood to increase the pathogen removal effect, quantified.
Experiments using rats demonstrated the therapeutic effect of methicillin-resistant S. aureus and carbapenem-resistant E. coli, which are known to be difficult to treat with conventional antibiotics. When mice infected with these bacteria were treated with a newly developed blood purification treatment, all of them survived. A week after the treatment, the immune system returned to normal.
The first author, Park Seong-jin, a researcher in the Department of Biomedical Engineering at UNIST, said, “We used blood cells that exist in the body, and magnetic nanoparticles that capture pathogens are completely removed of the blood. It will be handled without it.”
When the infected mice were continuously treated with blood purifiers, the concentration of pathogenic microorganisms that had infiltrated the lungs or kidneys following bacterial infection decreased. Co-author Kwon Se-yong, a research professor in the Department of Biomedical Engineering at UNIST, expected that “continuous blood purification treatment will help treat organ failure caused by pathogenic infections.”
Professor Joo-Heon Kang, the research director, said, “It is a technology that mimics the immune response principle that our body has innately and can get rid of many types of infectious agents without previous diagnosis. disease treatment technology that can respond quickly to epidemics.”
Researchers Lee Min-seok, Jang Bong-hwan, and Axel E. Guzmán-Cedillo from UNIST’s Department of Biomedical Engineering participated in this study. The results of the research were published in the forthcoming online edition of ‘Small’, a world-renowned academic journal published by Wiley on September 7. )
