Abstract 1712 Investigating the use of Bacterial Extracellular Vesicles as a Biomarker for Sepsis

Sepsis is a leading cause of death globally and in the United States, due in part to inherent challenges in diagnosis.Our research team is currently investigating the potential use of bacterial extracellular vesicles (bEVs) to diagnose bacterial sepsis.BEVs are spherical nanoparticles released by both Gram-negative and Gram-positive bacteria.BEVs are thought to play important biological roles in inter-bacterial communication and natural adaptions to changes in environmental conditions, and typically contain proteins, nucleic acids, and other biomolecules from their parent bacterium.We hypothesized that bEVs released from bacteria could be isolated from the biofluid of sepsis patients and used to diagnose the causal infection.However, the isolation of these nanoparticles from complex biofluids, such as blood, has proven challenging.While our research team has made significant progress toward developing methods to isolate and detect bEVs from patient blood, we have also detected Escherichia coli bEVs in the blood plasma of healthy donors, suggesting that there may be a background level of bEVs from commensal bacteria present in our bloodstream.Further work must be done to confirm this hypothesis and to understand the potential impact of these systemic bEVs on inflammation and overall health.