SEPSIS DIAGNOSTICS RESEARCH
A new approach
to an
old problem.
Sepsis kills 11 million people each year. Diagnosing it precisely and quickly remains one of medicine's hardest unsolved challenges. We think there is a better way.
DIA-AID is an early-stage research company investigating whether multi-omics — the combination of genomic, proteomic and metabolomic signals — can unlock faster, more precise sepsis identification. We are at the beginning of that journey, grounded in clinical science and part of the Sahlgrenska Science Park ecosystem in Gothenburg, with roots in the Sahlgrenska Global Health Hackathon where the concept was first challenged and refined.
---THE PROBLEM
Sepsis is medicine's
diagnostic blind spot.
It is the leading cause of preventable death in intensive care worldwide. And the tools we use to identify it were designed for a different era.
The current gold standard - blood culture - takes two to five days to return a result. During that window, clinicians must make life-or-death treatment decisions without sufficient information. Patients receive broad-spectrum antibiotics by default, driving resistance and causing harm of its own kind.
GLOBAL SEPSIS DEATHS
11M
per year — more than many cancers combined. Sepsis is not a rare disease. It is a common disease with a visibility problem.
Source: Rudd et al., The Lancet, 2020
MORTALITY INCREASE PER HOUER OF DELAYED TREATMENT
~7-8%
The diagnostic window is the critical bottleneck. Earlier, more targeted treatment is one of the few interventions proven to meaningfully reduce mortality.
Source: Kumar et al., Critical Care Medicine, 2006
The problem has two compounding dimensions. The first is speed: by the time a result comes back, the opportunity for early intervention may have passed. The second is precision: knowing that a patient has an infection is not the same as knowing which pathogen, how resistant it is, or which treatment is most likely to work.
Current methods address neither dimension well. They were not designed to. They pre-date genomics, proteomics and the computational tools that now make a different kind of analysis imaginable.
Antibiotic resistance is already causing over a million deaths a year. Sepsis sits at its epicentre - every day of broad-spectrum treatment in place of targeted therapy is a day the resistance burden grows.
Source: Antimicrobial Resistance Collaborators, The Lancet, 2022
OUR SCIENTIFIC HYPOTHESIS
What if the answer
is alreadyin the blood?
We are not building on existing diagnostic methods. We are asking a more fundamental question: what becomes detectable when you look at the full biological picture — genomic, proteomic and metabolomic signals together?
DIA-AID's scientific hypothesis is that the host's biological response to sepsis - the systemic signals that a body in crisis produces — carries more diagnostic information than current methods are designed to extract. We are in the early stages of investigating whether multi-omics approaches, combined with machine learning, can make that information clinically useful.
WHY NOW
The conditions for this
to work have just arrived.
Multi-omics research has been theoretically possible for years. What is new is that the cost, speed and computational infrastructure needed to do it at clinical scale have arrived at the same time.
WHO THIS IS FOR
Different reasons
to follow this work.
We are early. But we are building in a direction that touches many fields. Here is what DIA-AID means from where you stand.
