Effectiveness of Multiple Blood-Cleansing Interventions in Sepsis, Characterized in Rats

Sepsis is a serious, life-threatening condition that presents a growing problem in medicine, but there is still no satisfying solution for treating it. Several blood cleansing approaches recently gained attention as promising interventions that target the main site of problem development–the blood. The focus of this study is an evaluation of the theoretical effectiveness of hemoadsorption therapy and pathogen reduction therapy. This is evaluated using the mathematical model of Murine sepsis, and the results of over 2,200 configurations of single and multiple intervention therapies simulated on 5,000 virtual subjects suggest the advantage of pathogen reduction over hemoadsorption therapy. However, a combination of two approaches is found to take advantage of their complementary effects and outperform either therapy alone. The conducted computational experiments provide unprecedented evidence that the combination of two therapies synergistically enhances the positive effects beyond the simple superposition of the benefits of two approaches. Such a characteristic could have a profound influence on the way sepsis treatment is conducted.