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. The "bio-spleen" was developed to treat sepsis, or blood infection, which affects 18 million people in the world every year, with a 30-50 percent mortality rate. 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 told AFP.
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