Every year, sepsis kills an estimated 11 million people worldwide – that’s nearly one in five deaths globally. In the United States alone, it claims approximately 350,000 lives annually, more than breast cancer, prostate cancer, and opioid overdose combined.
Despite its deadly toll, sepsis often flies under the radar. “It’s not a heart attack or a stroke,” said Ajay Shah, Ph.D, co-founder and CEO of Cytovale, a medical diagnostics company. “But it’s just as urgent – and potentially more deadly.”
Ajay Shah, Ph.D
Co-Founder and CEO, Cytovale
Sepsis occurs when the body’s immune response to infection spirals out of control, attacking its own tissues and organs. It progresses rapidly, making early detection critical. But that’s also the biggest hurdle. “To paraphrase a famous quote,” Shah explained, “sepsis is very easy to treat when it’s hard to detect – and very hard to treat when it’s easy to detect.”
Now, a new blood test is helping to change that. By enabling faster, more accurate diagnosis in Emergency Departments (ED) across the country, this technology offers a crucial head start in the fight against one of medicine’s most elusive and deadly syndromes.
The challenge
The symptoms of sepsis are very common and broad, similar to a common cold or flu. Therefore, in the first minutes of an ED visit, it can be difficult and time-consuming to rapidly identify patients at high risk. And those delays matter: “The sepsis shock mortality increases by 8% per hour of delayed diagnosis,” Shah stressed, continuing, “and the common strategy of trying to treat everyone leads to a crushing demand on our nurses and physicians, rather than enabling them to focus efforts on the patients who’ll actually benefit from aggressive care”.
The difficulty in diagnosing sepsis also increases costs to both the individual and the healthcare provider in terms of extra days in a hospital and healthcare resources spent chasing down additional tests, imaging and treatments.
IntelliSep
Enter IntelliSep — a revolutionary test that is changing the way sepsis is diagnosed in the ED.
IntelliSep is an AI-enabled biomechanical test. “The way IntelliSep works is – in 8 minutes – we physically squeeze about 50,000 individual white blood cells from a patient’s blood sample,” Shah explained. The system then relies on an AI trained algorithm to interpret video data and analyze the cells’ response. “The output from the Cytovale system gives the clinician a simple, clinically actionable score that we call the IntelliSep Index.”
That index is organized into three straightforward “bands” — Band 1 indicates a low probability (< 2%) of sepsis, Band 2 indicates that further investigation is needed, and Band 3 indicates a high probability of sepsis. “IntelliSep enables physicians to see sepsis early,” Shah explained.
Impact
IntelliSep has been used in the evaluation of more than 30,000 patients across five states, and its impact has been immediate. “One health system shared that by leveraging IntelliSep they’re able to reduce patients’ length of stay by nearly a day,” Shah noted. “And by detecting sepsis in a patient before they look visibly sick in the ED, they’re able to accelerate patients’ care by over an hour.”
This has given Cytovale’s health system partners the ability to reduce risk-adjusted sepsis mortality by over 30%. “That’s a lot of people,” Shah said. “It translates to about a life saved each week in their hospital.”
As equally important and just as quickly, IntelliSep screens out patients who don’t have sepsis, freeing up limited resources and getting that patient the care they actually need. “Physicians can focus their energy on the patients who really need it most,” Shah pointed out.
Shah is excited about the potential of IntelliSep to help more people. “We’re still very early in our journey,” he said. “What we’re focused on is increasing access to IntelliSep by partnering with forward-thinking health systems.”
Click here to learn more about IntelliSep
