SPEED UK
Research type
Research Study
Full title
Sepsis Prognosis and Diagnosis in the Emergency Department using a host response classifier (SPEED) UK – a multi-centre observational study.
IRAS ID
319261
Contact name
Liza Keating
Contact email
Sponsor organisation
Inflammatix Inc.
Duration of Study in the UK
0 years, 4 months, 31 days
Research summary
Sepsis is a life-threatening condition which happens when the body overreacts to an infection. In the UK, around 250,000 people are affected by sepsis every year and there are around 50,000 deaths because of it.
Unfortunately, there is no quick way to accurately work out if someone has an infection or not. Only patients with an infection can get sepsis and need urgent treatment, such as antibiotics, for it.
Right now, the best test to work out if you have an infection can take several days to give a result and can miss a lot of infections. For patients who are very sick with sepsis, urgent treatment is needed within hours, rather than days, and so doctors do not usually wait for the results of this test.
We intend to carry out a study to see if a new type of blood test, that can be done quickly, can work out if a patient has an infection. If there is an infection, the blood test will try to tell us if the infection is caused by bacteria or a virus, which are the two common types of infection which can lead to sepsis and need to be treated differently. Finally, the blood test will try and predict if the patient will become very sick whilst they are in hospital, for example needing to be admitted to a critical care unit.
The study will involve around 450 patients from several Emergency Departments in the UK. Each patient would provide 2 or 3 samples depending on their condition. This is an observational study, so would not affect patients' care otherwise. However, if this study shows that the blood test works well, then a bigger study will be carried out to see if it can be used in real time across the NHS.
REC name
London - Queen Square Research Ethics Committee
REC reference
22/LO/0786
Date of REC Opinion
28 Oct 2022
REC opinion
Favourable Opinion