New international guidelines on Pre-Clinical Sepsis Studies

While the clinical definition of sepsis as well as the guidelines for patient management have been updated several times, pre-clinical sepsis research has not been subjected to any organized attempt at introducing best practices, management guidelines and standardization. This creates a large quality gap and confusion, with conflicting data reflecting the variations found in different labs, hampering efficient translation of research into clinics.

MQTiPSS Executive Summary was simultaneously published in Shock, Intensive Care Medicine Experimental and Infection journals (October 12, 2099)

An initiative by international experts on sepsis has now published new guidelines on sepsis studies as a result of last year’s Wiggers-Bernard Conference, which took place in Vienna. The scientists met their goal to identify the limitations of pre-clinical sepsis modeling and to formulate basic guidelines that would enhance the translational value of findings. These guidelines (in a form of 29 recommendation and consideration points) have been summarized under the banner of so called “Minimum Quality Threshold in Pre-Clinical Sepsis Studies” (MQTiPSS). The outcome of the initiative has been just published in the form of an Executive Summary article in the journals Shock, Infection and  Intensive Care Medicine Experimental (see above) while the specific details to the individual MQTiPSS points are published in three full-sized articles in Shock (links below).

Part I-III commentary articles to MQTiPSS concensus guidelines were published in the January issue (2019) of journal SHOCK.

Part I article: doi: 10.1097/SHK.0000000000001243 (PubMed ID: 30106874)
Part II article: doi: 10.1097/SHK.0000000000001242 (PubMed ID: 30106873)
Part III article: doi: 10.1097/SHK.0000000000001209 (PubMed ID: 29923896)

Thanks to the courtesy of the European Society of Intensive Care Medicine, the importance of the MQTiPSS is explained in the short podcast interview (link below) with the Wiggers-Bernard initiative coordinator and Intensive Care Head at LBI Trauma, Marcin Osuchowski. Additionally, a short animation movie describes the entire concept in an approachable layman terms at: NEW ARTICLE ALERT: Pre-clinical Sepsis Study Guidelines

The authors believe that the proposed MQTiPSS guideline points will be recognized as best practices and implemented to bring standardization to pre-clinical models of sepsis and ultimately improve translation of pre-clinical findings into clinics.