Turning a pathogen protein into a therapeutic tool for sepsis.

Sepsis causes unacceptably high amounts of deaths worldwide. It is a huge unmet medical need, and new therapeutic interventions for sepsis and septic shock are urgently needed. By studying the mechanism by which a bacterial protein undermines the inflammatory function of macrophages, Kim et al, in the last issue of EMBO Molecular Medicine, have developed a new therapeutic protein drug, which appears to have very promising protective activities in a well-validated and aggressive polymicrobial sepsis model in mice. The chimeric protein is thought to limit macrophage inflammation while activating phagocytosis, and so, it hits two macrophage pathways at once.