Wyss InstituteSepsis – Wyss Institute

Can We Stop Stabbing Babies? – Salivary Diagnostics for Sepsis Screening in the Neonate

Jessica Leff — Wed, 10 Sep 2025 20:51:39 +0000

Every day, across the neonatal care unit, babies are being stabbed to collect their blood for sepsis tests. Adding to this dismal situation, diagnostics developed to assess sepsis in blood are very inaccurate, leading to the unnecessary prescription of antibiotics. Researchers at the Wyss Institute and Brigham and Women’s Hospital have created a more accurate diagnostic platform using easily…

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The Wyss Institute’s 2025-2026 Validation Projects

Jessica Leff — Thu, 14 Aug 2025 15:00:53 +0000

Throughout recent years, the Wyss’ Validation Project mechanism has proven to be a highly valuable instrument for selecting and kick-starting projects with early potential for positive impact on healthcare and the environment. Reaching deep into areas with major unmet needs across the diverse Grand Challenges laid out by the Institute, the newly selected projects are driven by multi-talented teams…

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NeoSense: Sepsis Detection in Newborns

Mariel Schoen — Tue, 05 Aug 2025 15:54:38 +0000

Sepsis is a life-threatening condition, and the third leading cause of neonatal mortality worldwide. In the U.S., there are about 1.75M suspected cases each year, accounting for 60% of NICU admissions. Current sepsis diagnostics rely on painful blood draws that can take days to deliver results – often leading to unnecessary antibiotic use. To address this challenge, we’re creating NeoSense…

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Wyss Institute team selected by DARPA-SHIELD program to develop first-of-its-kind biologically engineered broad-spectrum antimicrobial therapeutic

Jessica Leff — Mon, 16 Sep 2024 13:25:50 +0000

By Benjamin Boettner (BOSTON) — Researchers at the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard University received a contract for up to $12M from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA)’s new SHIELD program. The SHIELD (Synthetic Hemo-technologies to Locate and Disinfect) program aims to develop a prophylactic treatment that can be broadly administered to…

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Reimagining Protein Engineering Inspired by His Father: Mike Super

Jessica Leff — Thu, 12 Jan 2023 16:33:16 +0000

Mike Super is a Lead Staff Scientist using protein engineering to design therapeutic and diagnostic devices to treat cancer, and infectious and immunological diseases. He also leads the Biostasis team at the Wyss. In this video, he shares his personal and professional journey that began in the deserts of Namibia shadowing his father, one of the few pediatricians in the area. We learn how his…

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Accelerating pathogen identification in infants and children with bloodstream infections

Jessica Leff — Fri, 02 Dec 2022 20:44:23 +0000

By Benjamin Boettner / Wyss Institute Communications (LONDON) — A collaborative team led by researchers from Great Ormond Street Institute of Child Health (GOSH), London and including researchers from the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard University and BOA Biomedical in Cambridge has re-engineered the process of microbial pathogen identification in blood samples…

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eRapid: developing a multiplexed electrochemical diagnostic platform from the ground up

Jessica Leff — Thu, 09 Sep 2021 17:24:34 +0000

By Benjamin Boettner (BOSTON) – In an article published in the prestigious Accounts in Chemical Research, Wyss Institute Founding Director Donald Ingber, M.D., Ph.D., and his sensor team led by Senior Staff Scientist Pawan Jolly, Ph.D. in the Wyss Institute’s Bioinspired Therapeutics & Diagnostics Platform, describe the development and evolution of their eRapid affinity-based electrochemical…

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Biomaterial vaccines ward off broad range of bacterial infections and septic shock

Jessica Leff — Thu, 08 Jul 2021 15:00:29 +0000

By Benjamin Boettner (BOSTON) — Current clinical interventions for infectious diseases are facing increasing challenges due to the ever-rising number of drug-resistant microbial infections, epidemic outbreaks of pathogenic bacteria, and the continued possibility of new biothreats that might emerge in the future. Effective vaccines could act as a bulwark to prevent many bacterial infections and…

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Detecting multiple sepsis biomarkers from whole blood – made fast, accurate, and cheap

Jessica Leff — Fri, 12 Feb 2021 16:58:57 +0000

By Benjamin Boettner (BOSTON) — Many life-threatening medical conditions, such as sepsis, which is triggered by blood-borne pathogens, cannot be detected accurately and quickly enough to initiate the right course of treatment. In patients who suffer infection by an unknown pathogen that then progresses to overt sepsis, every additional hour that an effective antibiotic cannot be administered…

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Rapid Metabolite-Sensing System for Blood Lactate

admin — Wed, 02 Sep 2020 20:58:10 +0000

In emergency medicine, blood lactate levels are a reliable real-time indicator of the severity and mortality risk of conditions that occur as a result of poor blood circulation and oxygen supply to organs and tissues (hypoperfusion), such as in patients with sepsis, cardiac arrest, stroke, major trauma, cystic fibrosis and other conditions. Lactate levels also provide an early measure for the…

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