Although it’s considered preventable, sepsis kills 11 million people every year, according to the World Health Organization.
Dr. Cuthbert Simpkins, a researcher at UMKC and president of Vivacelle Bio Inc., has spent the last 40 years developing a treatment for it.
When you get infected with a disease, your immune system produces chemicals to fight back -- including nitric oxide. But your body can actually overreact, leading to blood poisoning, also known as sepsis.
Simpkins needed a treatment that would not block the production of nitric oxide, but could lower its concentration. However, his resources were initially limited.
“At that time, I was experimenting on mice, and I was taking leftover mice from other people's labs. If I could have caught a mouse, I would have,” Simpkins told KCUR’s Up to Date. “I didn't have funding. I didn't have much, but it made me think in a very basic way, and the circumstances made me focus my thinking.”
But because nitric oxide is hydrophobic, Simpkins created a VBI-S, a nanoparticle containing soybean oil, that can transport nitric oxide from high to low concentrations and increase blood volume.
There is a current FDA approved clinical trial for this product testing it as a treatment for sepsis in humans, and Simpkins said it could be commercially available by 2027. Using a similar concept, Simpkins and his biotech company are also developing VBI-1 as a treatment for blood loss. They are currently testing it on animals.
“We remove enough blood so that the animal's dead,” Simpkins said. “We give them our fluid and the animal’s alive again.”
His research team is describing their product as “better than blood,” because blood transfusions cause tissue damage while early tests show VBI-1 does not. Simpkins claims this type of product could eliminate blood supply shortages altogether.
- Dr. Cuthbert Simpkins, Sosland-Missouri Endowed Chair of Trauma Services at the UMKC School of Medicine, and president of Vivacelle Bio Inc.
