The invention was created by Don Ingber at the Harvard Medical School and Children's hospital and it's designed to augment the effect of antibiotics in combating bacterial infections of the blood. These are the infections that apparently kill some 200,000 American citizens each year, so the potential benefits of the treatment could be pretty significant.
Ingber's technique eschews the traditional fine porous methods for filtering blood, and instead specifically targets the bacteria themselves. Microscopic plastic-coated beads of iron oxide are treated with antibodies that seek out the infecting cells, and attach to them -- the beads would be injected into a patient, but in Ingber's experiments the blood was treated in vitro. Next the blood-bead mix is pushed through a dialysis-type machine, where an electromagnet simply attracts the iron beads, bacterial and all, while the cleaned-up blood cycles on and back into the patient.
The beauty of the invention is in its simplicity, and the fact that in tests it removed up to 80% of the pathogens, which is enough that the rest can be easily cleared up with traditional antibiotic remedies.
Ingber is confident his technique will perform well when he moves on to animal experimentation later this year, and that it can even be expanded to cover removing cancer cells from blood in a similar style. It's merely a question of coating the iron microbeads with the right chemicals so they bond to the unwanted target cells. One can even imagine a future where a patient is injected with a concoction of specially engineered filtration beads, each designed to tackle a particular problem -- which is a plot trick I'm sure I've seen on Star Trek sometimes.
http://www.popsci.com/scitech/article/2009-06/dr-magneto
A
Magnetic Machine Plucks Pathogens from Blood
A new treatment could save some of the hundreds of
thousands of Americans dying sepsis-related deaths every
year
Nonfatal
Attraction: An
electromagnet pulls out 80 percent of an infectious
pathogen
If your uncle says he's getting magnetic therapy, you might feel the urge to tell him to save his money instead for that tinfoil hat to keep the CIA from reading his mind. But if he's being hooked up to Don Ingber's magnet machine, it just might save his life.
Ingber's device magnetizes microbes and draws them out of the blood. It could save some of the 210,000 Americans — mostly newborns and the elderly — who die sepsis-related deaths every year. Sepsis sets in when bacteria or fungi invade the blood, which can cause organ failure before drugs have time to take effect. "Traditionally, you prescribe antibiotics and pray," says Ingber, a vascular biologist at Harvard Medical School and Children's Hospital. His machine operates more quickly.
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