In March of 2024, Professor XU Feng’s team from the Children’s Hospital of CQMU and Professor ZOU Zhen’s team from the Institute of Life Sciences of CQMU co-published a research paper in the internationally renowned journal ‘Critical Care’ entitled “The protective effect of apolipoprotein H in paediatric sepsis”.
Sepsis is a major cause of mortality among children worldwide, with an estimated annual 25 million incidences affecting children, potentially leading to 3 million deaths. However, there is currently a lack of effective drugs suitable for medical intervention. Researchers identified a significant downregulation of apolipoprotein H (APOH) in paediatric sepsis patients via the paediatric sepsis biobank, established at the paediatric Intensive Care Unit of the Children’s Hospital of CQMU, by using a combination of liquid chromatography tandem mass spectrometry and enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay in both the pilot and validation cohorts. Moreover, their results showed that APOH exhibited a protective effect on organ function and reduced mortality rates in a septic mouse model. Mechanistic studies revealed that APOH may inhibit M1 polarization in macrophages, as well as the inflammatory response and organ injuries by suppressing NF-κB/TLR4 signalling pathway.
This study has revealed the protective effect of APOH in paediatric sepsis for the first time and has submitted an application for a national invention patent, which may help provide new insights for the development of new drugs for treating paediatric sepsis. Professor XU from the Intensive Care Unit of the Children’s Hospital of CQMU and Professor ZOU from the Institute of Life Sciences of CQMU are the co-corresponding authors of this article, while YU Zhicai, a PhD student of the 2021 batch from the Children’s Hospital of CQMU, and Dr. XIAO Changxue, a physician from the Intensive Care Unit of the Children’s Hospital of CQMU, are the co-first authors. This study was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China.
Link to full article:
https://ccforum.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s13054-024-04809-2
