A study conducted by UNMC infectious disease specialist Andre Kalil, M.D., makes a case for a potentially life-saving sepsis drug that was taken off the market last year by the drug company that produced it.
Dr. Kalil, associate professor in the UNMC Department of Internal Medicine, studied a non-antibiotic drug known as Xigris, which was taken off the market by its maker, Eli Lilly, in 2011 over concerns of its efficacy. Sepsis is a deadly blood infection that results in death in one-third of patients.
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Andre Kalil, M.D. |
In his study, which is published in the July 17 edition of the British journal, The Lancet Infectious Diseases, Dr. Kalil found that the drug reduced the risk of death by 18 percent in the studied patients.
“Even though the company has removed the drug from the market, we should take these results seriously, considering the fact we studied close to 50,000 patients from nine different countries,” Dr. Kalil said. “There’s no other drug for sepsis that works in this way.”
How Xigris works
Xigris regulates the body’s inflammatory response to the infection, so that the harmful effect of the response, which is sepsis, is minimized.
The results of the study raise the question if the drug should be put back on the market, as physicians are desperate to find a more effective way to treat sepsis. Currently, antibiotics are the only and most effective drug treatment for sepsis. But even with antibiotics and good medical care, still one-third of patients die.
On par with heart attacks
In the United States, close to 1 million people get sepsis every year. About 300,000 die. As many people die yearly from severe sepsis as do from heart attacks, Dr. Kalil said.
Dr. Steven LaRosa of Beverly Hospital in Massachusetts was Dr. Kalil’s co-author on the study.
Top-notch research from top-notch physician !.