Scientists unveil magnetic cure to clean up blood

Scientists said Sunday they had invented a device that uses a magnet to extract bacteria, fungi and toxins from blood, potentially throwing a lifeline to patients with sepsis and other infections. The external gadget, tested so far in rats but not yet humans, could be adapted one day for stripping Ebola and other viruses from blood. Acting rather like a spleen, the invention uses magnetic nanobeads coated with a genetically-engineered human blood protein called MBL. The MBL binds to pathogens and toxins, which can then be “pulled out” with a magnet, the developers wrote in the journal Nature Medicine.

This treatment could be carried out even before the pathogen has been formally identified and the optimal antibiotic treatment has been chosen.

Co-author Donald Ingber of Harvard University, Massachusetts

If the invention is shown to be safe for humans, “patients could be treated with our bio-spleen and this will physically clean up their blood, rapidly removing a wide spectrum of live pathogens as well as dead fragments and toxins from the blood,” study co-author Donald Ingber said. The cleansed blood is then returned to the circulatory system. The MBL protein is known to bind to the Ebola virus “and so it potentially might be useful for treatment of these patients,” said Ingber. However, years of testing in larger animals and then in humans lie ahead before the bio-spleen can be approved.

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