“This research funding award represents recognition by the NIH and scientific colleagues throughout the nation of the leading research in sepsis going on at CNM focused on understanding and thwarting the pathogenesis of sepsis, a common syndrome that remains one of the most difficult to detect and treat effectively,” said Marth, who is also the Carbon Professor of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology and the Mellichamp Professor of Systems Biology at UCSB. “With this grant, we will be able to more rapidly and more effectively follow up on our earlier discoveries of a completely new approach to the treatment of sepsis that once in the clinic may save millions of lives.”

The new grant supports an ongoing collaboration of UCSB, the Sanford-Burnham Medical Research Institute, the Santa Barbara Cottage Hospital and UC San Diego that is focusing on advancing these discoveries to the point of clinical trials. His team has already shown the method increases, by twofold, sepsis survival rates in models of bacterial infection.

Now, using Cottage’s robust data registry of septic patients, including blood samples from consenting participants, the research will accelerate to further translate the approach for human patients.