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Researchers Targeting Bacterial Blood Infections

University of Michigan Health System

University of Michigan researchers are working to find ways to better diagnose and treat bacteremia, a potentially fatal infection in the blood caused by bacterial infections. Bacteremia is a growing problem as more bacterium develop resistance to antibiotic drugs.

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SUNCOAST NEWS STAFF REPORT

Published: November 19, 2008

Bacteria can cause potentially fatal infections that can spread along the bloodstream and attack organs such the lungs or bladder. With bacteria increasingly showing resistance to standard antibiotic drugs, this is a growing, if somewhat under-reported, human health risk.

Researchers at the University of Michigan, however, are using a combination of laboratory studies and mathematical models to explore these bacterial infections of the bloodstream, known as bacteremia.

Bacteremia, which can cause toxic sepsis, potentially poses an added threat to people with compromised immune systems, such as people receiving anti-cancer drugs that can kill immune cells.

Dr. John Younger, an associate professor of emergency medicine at the U-M Medical School, says he and his colleagues are looking for "mechanical tricks" that could help the body filter out of the bloodstream dangerous bacteria that antibiotics can't kill.

The researchers have been using the computer modeling to analyze how bacteria move through the human blood stream. By and large, the pathogens move at the same speed of the other cells blood, such as red and white blood cells and platelets, within the large blood vessel.

This makes it hard for the white blood cells to "change lanes" within the bloodstream and perform their prime immune system function, attacking and neutralizing invaders such as bacteria, according to Younger. In the small blood vessels known as capillaries, however, they are more likely to become immobilized and vulnerable to white blood cells attacks.

Younger and his colleagues are studying ways to filter bacteria into capillary-rich areas such as the liver, lung or spleen or get them to clump together, a process known as flocculation. Either would render them vulnerable to white cell attack.

The researchers are exploring alternative ways to treat bacterial infections because bacteria can undergo genetic mutations that render them resistant to antibiotic drugs. This is why Younger and his team are asking "are there mechanical tricks you can play on bacteria that don't require antibiotics," he said.

The U-M researchers recently reported on their studies of bacterial movement in the bloodstream, still in their early stages, in the journals Shock, the Bulletin of Mathematical Biology and Academic Emergency Medicine.

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