Critical Care Trials

What we do

• Our group conducts translational research in sepsis ranging from early laboratory work through to large-scale national and international clinical trials.
• Our goal is to develop novel, basic science discoveries into effective diagnostic and treatment strategies that improve clinical care of critically ill patients.

Why it is important

Sepsis is life-threatening organ dysfunction caused by a dysregulated immune response by the body to infection. Sepsis has both a high mortality and morbidity rate. It is very common worldwide with more than 120,000 patients in the UK alone admitted to intensive care units (ICU) with sepsis each year, costing the NHS over £2 billion in care for these patients.

Summary of current research

Our aim is to improve outcomes for patients who have sepsis. Understanding that sepsis is a heterogeneous syndrome is key to the success of our sepsis research. Many attempts to develop new treatment strategies have failed, in part, due to grouping sepsis patients based on similar but non-specific clinical characteristics.

We aim to address this through:

• Better understanding of the immunological changes in sepsis, focusing on monocyte and microvesicle biology. 
• Investigating the genomic, transcriptomic and metabonomic effects and changes in sepsis developing novel diagnostic clinical tests to improve the management of patients with sepsis. 
• Developing new treatments for sepsis. 
• Combining novel diagnostics with new and existing treatments in clinical trials, developing a personalised medicine approach, thus allowing us to give the right patient, the right treatment, at the right time and at the right dose.