Overview

Sepset Biosciences is a medical diagnostic company in advanced development of a blood-based test (Sepset-ER) for hospitals to identify those patients in the emergency room (ER) and the intensive care unit (ICU) at a higher risk of developing sepsis and associated organ failure. Sepset’s test will provide much earlier (~1-2 hours) and more actionable information to help physicians select the right treatment for the right patients at the right time. This is critical since every hour’s delay in starting appropriate treatment leads to a 7.6% increased risk of death (Kumar, 2006). At the same time, the Sepset-ER test will inform physicians of patients who are not at a high risk of developing sepsis, sparing the need to use potent antibiotics and increase the risk of antimicrobial resistance. Sepset’s vision is to increase patient survival and improve quality of care, while at the same time improving efficiency in hospital spending.

History

Sepset Biosciences was launched in 2016 as a spinout company, as a collaboration between Dr. R.E.W (Bob) Hancock and the Centre for Drug Research and Development/adMare. It was based on the discovery by Drs. Hancock and Olga Pena of a novel gene signature that was able to distinguish between septic and non-septic patients and predict organ failure (Pena, 2014). This signature was filed for patent protection and patents have been granted in Europe, China and Hong Kong and are pending in other jurisdictions. Sepset has an exclusive license to these patents and the background intellectual property. Sepset was seed funded through a loan from CDRD who also provided management support. Recently, ASEP Medical acquired majority ownership of Sepset in exchange for $2.5 million of investment. Dr. Hancock and his collaborators have performed a large multi-center international clinical study (4 countries, 4 continents NCT04118179) and have statistically validated the gene signature demonstrating its high accuracy, sensitivity and specificity.