Juntao Luo, PhD, awarded more than $2 million to fund research on sepsis treatment

Upstate researcher Juntao Luo, PhD, continues to attract funding—securing a more than $2 million grant from the National Institute of General Medical Sciences (NIGMS)—in his effort to find an effective treatment for severe sepsis, which has a mortality rate of 30 to 40 percent.

This new funding will support Luo’s efforts at turning his nanotechnology into a bioactive therapeutic that could help prevent sepsis deaths, and potentially treat a wide range of inflammatory diseases.

Luo, a professor of pharmacology and an associate professor of surgery, along with his team at the Sepsis Interdisciplinary Research Center (SIRC) have spent years developing nanotrap technology, called a linear-dendritic telodendrimer (TD) nanoplatform. They created tiny structures called TD nanotraps that can capture a wide range of inflammatory signals all at once, helping to restore balance in the immune system. Now that they have developed the nanotraps, they will be using this funding from the NIGMS to create a bioactive nanodrug utilizing their technology to treat sepsis.

“The nanodrug stops the inflammatory molecules, e.g. endotoxin released in infection, from binding to the receptors on immune cells, controlling inflammation in sepsis and infectious diseases,” explained Luo.

The second step for this project is developing a nanotherapy to treat pyroptosis, a novel type of immune cell death that link to both hyperinflammation and immune suppression. Recent studies reports that pyroptosis have potentially linked to tumor growth. Then, he plans on creating a nanotherapy that can treat both sepsis and cancers.

“These nanodrugs can also be applied to delivery drug molecules, such as antibiotics, to reduce drug toxicity and treat infection and inflammation at the same time in infectious disease,” he said. “If you can control both, you have a better chance of survival.”

Luo is developing this nanotherapy parallel to his work developing an injectable nanotrap and hemoperfusion device funded by the Department of Defense ($3.3 million for four years). The injectable nanotrap can be used to treat battlefield injuries on site and the device can be plugged into a standard blood filtration system commonly available in military field hospitals to treat severe injuries. “By passing the patient’s blood through this column, then feeding it back into circulation, we can neutralize the inflammatory mediators in the blood to help prevent organ failure,” Luo said.

In addition to sepsis, these TD nanodrugs can also potentially be applied in other inflammatory diseases, like acute respiratory distress syndrome (ARDS), chronic wounds, rheumatoid arthritis, and inflammatory bowel diseases, and more.

You can learn more about this project here.

Learn more about the SIRC and their interdisciplinary efforts to treat sepsis here.