News India Times

www.newsindiatimes.com – that’s all you need to know Research Matters: Sepsis Detection Platform Saves Thousands Of Lives National Science Foundation funding helped Suchi Saria develop and launch a lifesaving early warning system that uses artificial intelligence to catch sepsis infections before they become deadly J ohns Hopkins engineer Suchi Saria has developed an AI-powered platform that is reducing sepsis mortal- ity rates by 18% in dozens of hospitals across the United States—a significant advance in addressing a deadly immune response that claims about 270,000 lives each year. Saria’s Targeted Real-Time EarlyWarning System, or TREWS, integrates electronic health records with machine learning to help doctors diagnose sepsis cases nearly two hours earlier than traditional methods. Sepsis is easily missed because many of its symptoms, such as fever and confusion, are common in other medical conditions, she says. And in severe sepsis cases, an hour’s delay in identification can be the difference between life and death. As described in Nature Medicine, the system’s earlier identification improves patient outcomes, reducing aver- age hospital stays by half a day and intensive care unit use by 10% since its deployment in 2023. Saria, an associate professor of computer science, biostatistics, health system informatics, and health policy and management, says that innovation like TREWS doesn’t happen in isolation—it requires intentional in- vestment and visionary support. She credits the National Science Foundation’s Future ofWork at the Human- Technology Frontier program with enabling her team to lay the groundwork for technologies that meaningfully augment clinical capacity by advancing methods that are scientifically rigorous and designed to integrate seam- lessly into real-world care. “At a time when clinicians are stretched thinner than ever, patients are older and sicker, and resources are finite, funding like this is essential. It powers the kind of breakthroughs that ensure health care evolves to meet tomorrow’s demands without compromising the qual- ity and humanity at its core,” says Saria, the founding research director of theWhiting School of Engineering’s Malone Center for Engineering in Healthcare and a mem- ber of the Johns Hopkins Data Science and AI Institute. Saria—who has been recognized for her work on AI in health care by media outlets like TIME, Business Insider, Modern Healthcare, and Popular Science—began fighting the devastating effects of sepsis after losing her nephew to the disease in 2017. TREWS has achieved a 90% adoption rate by seam- lessly integrating into clinicians’ workflows, leverag- ing comprehensive medical record data—including structured metrics like labs and vitals and unstructured insights from doctors’ notes—to identify patients at risk of life-threatening complications and recommend treat- ment protocols. Amid national clinician shortages and an aging, increasingly complex patient population, TREWS streamlines key clinical workflows from emergency department admission through discharge, ensuring continuity of care during staff changes and department transfers. Saria spun out this research through an NSF Small Business Innovation Research grant into a startup called Bayesian Health, transforming TREWS from an academic innovation into a scalable care augmentation platform capable of tackling many critical conditions beyond sep- sis. Bayesian is now partnering directly with academic, regional, and community health systems, dramatically expanding the platform’s reach by more than 800% last year. “Federal funding, including vital support from the NSF, was foundational to the development of TREWS,” Saria says. “It allowed us to conduct the kind of long- horizon, high-impact research that isn’t immediately profitable but is essential for building technologies that truly improve patient outcomes. Without this funding, in- novations like TREWS—born out of rigorous science and clinical collaboration—would not reach the bedside.” The consequences of losing this support are profound, she says. “Institutions like Johns Hopkins, long known for push- ing the boundaries of patient care, risk seeing their ability to innovate curtailed. More broadly, we risk creating an innovation gap where health care technology becomes stagnant, unable to keep pace with growing clinician shortages, rising patient complexity, and system-wide resource constraints. Continued investment is not optional—it’s what ensures our health care systems can meet the future.” -(This article appeared in the April 23, 2025 edition of hub.jhu.edu . Used herewith permission) By Jaimie Patterson PHOTO:WILL KIRK,JOHNS HOPKINS UNIVERSITY Suchi Saria Exclusive-WHO Set To Back Use Of Weight-Loss Drugs For Adults Globally, Raises Cost Issue T heWorld Health Organization plans to officially back the use of weight-loss drugs to treat obesity in adults for the first time, a memo reviewed by Reuters on Thursday showed, marking a shift in its approach to treating the global health problem. The UN agency also called for strategies to improve access to the treatment in low- and middle-income countries. More than a billion people now have obesity worldwide, according to theWHO, and around 70% of them live in low and middle-income countries, theWorld Bank estimates. The wildly popular obesity drugs -We- govy developed by Novo Nordisk and Zep- bound by Eli Lilly - are known as GLP-1 receptor agonists, which mimic the activ- ity of a hormone that slows digestion and helps people feel full for longer. In clinical trials, people lost 15% to 20% of their body weight, depending on the drug. The drugs have been launched in the United States and other high-income countries like Germany and Britain. But they can cost over $1,000 a month, and studies suggest people may have to take the drugs for the rest of their lives to keep the weight off. “WHO has been working on a set of new recommendations for obesity pre- vention, care, and treatment in different age groups – children, adolescents, and adults since 2022,” said aWHO spokesper- son by email. The recommendations for the drugs, which will be finalised by Au- gust or September this year, will include “how and when this class of medications may be integrated as one component of a chronic care model that includes both clinical and lifestyle interventions.” Eli Lilly and Novo Nordisk were not im- mediately available for comment. Separately, WHO experts will also meet next week to decide whether to include the GLP-1 drugs in the agency’s essential medicines list - both to treat obesity and type 2 diabetes. TheWHO’s essential medicines list is a catalogue of the drugs that should be available in all functioning health systems, and it can help make drugs more widely available in poorer countries, as experts say happened in 2002 when HIV drugs were included. In 2023, the experts decided against adding obesity drugs to the list, withWHO saying more evidence was needed on their long-term clinical benefit. However, in the new memo recom- mending their use as a treatment, the agency says it supports including them on the list this time round. Still, theWHO also raises concerns over the cost of the drugs and calls for longer- term studies on cost-effectiveness “across all settings, including LMICs” (low- and middle-income countries). “The same mechanisms that are used in large-scale medicine access pro- grammes may need to be adopted,” to improve access, theWHO adds, such as tiered pricing or pooled procurement. But it also notes that the active ingredi- ent in one of the newer drugs, semaglu- tide - used in Novo’sWegovy - comes off patent in some markets next year. Several companies are planning to launch cheaper generic versions of the drugs then. Liraglutide, the active ingre- dient in the older generation of drugs, is already available as a lower-cost generic drug, with products approved in the U.S. and Europe, the memo adds. -Reuters By Jennifer Rigby Community News India Times (May 3, 2025 - May 9, 2025) May 9, 2025 8