Bacterial infections that don’t respond to antibiotics are of rising concern. And so is sepsis — the immune system’s last-ditch, failed attack on infection that ends up being lethal itself. Sepsis is the largest killer of newborns and children worldwide and, in the U.S. alone, kills a quarter of a million people each year. Like antibiotic-resistant infections, it has no good treatment.
Reporting this week in Nature, scientists in Boston Children’s Hospital’s Program in Cellular and Molecular Medicine (PCMM) describe new potential avenues for controlling both sepsis and the runaway bacterial infections that provoke it. …