According to scientists at the University of Sheffield and Harvard University, the immune system of children could hold the key to preventing life-threatening infections and sepsis.
Sepsis, also known as blood poisoning, is the reaction to an infection that causes the body to attack its own organs and tissue. It affects more than 20 million people worldwide and is responsible for more deaths in the U.K. than bowel, breast, and prostate cancer combined.
The new study has helped scientists identify key differences in cell-pathway activity in the blood of septic adults and children. Establishing the pathways that help prevent sepsis is a powerful new way to discover drugs for intervention against sepsis and provides direct insight into potential cures for the disease.
"Children are naturally more resistant to lots of infectious diseases," said Winston Hide, professor of computational biology at the University of Sheffield's Institute of Translational Neuroscience and an author on the study published in Molecular Systems Biology recently.
"During outbreaks like Spanish flu and Ebola we know that children survived much better than adults,” Hide added. “By analyzing the blood profiles of infected children and comparing them to adults with sepsis we were able to identify children whose natural resilience helped them to ward off infection.”
The findings of the study are now also being used to design drugs for research into prevention of other pathological diseases including Alzheimer's.