Scientists unveil magnetic cure for bad blood

[riky]

Scientists unveil magnetic cure for bad blood

<p><a href="http://news.yahoo.com/scientists-unveil-magnetic-cure-bad-blood-205700833.html"><img src="http://l3.yimg.com/bt/api/res/1.2/pRL7AD2GOZO.X8PTDONeHQ--/YXBwaWQ9eW5ld3M7Zmk9ZmlsbDtoPTg2O3E9NzU7dz0xMzA-/http://media.zenfs.com/en_us/News/afp.com/b05e19f89a36383576155625104e46b9a0db555b.jpg" width="130" height="86" alt="A blood bag and test tubes filled with blood are pictured on July 6, 2012 in Paris" align="left" title="A blood bag and test tubes filled with blood are pictured on July 6, 2012 in Paris" border="0" /></a>Acting rather like a spleen, the invention uses magnetic nanobeads coated with a genetically-engineered human blood protein called MBL. The MBL binds to pathogens and toxins, which can then be &quot;pulled out&quot; with a magnet, the developers wrote in the journal Nature Medicine. The &quot;bio-spleen&quot; was developed to treat sepsis, or blood infection, which affects 18 million people in the world every year, with a 30-50 percent mortality rate. If the invention is shown to be safe for humans, &quot;patients could be treated with our bio-spleen and this will physically clean up their blood, rapidly removing a wide spectrum of live pathogens as well as dead fragments and toxins from the blood,&quot; study co-author Donald Ingber told AFP.</p><br clear="all"/>

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