The German Sepsis Society honours excellent research in the field of blood poisoning

Jena, Germany (ots) - Sepsis, also referred to as blood poisoning, is the major cause of death in surgical intensive care units worldwide. In Germany, each year, at least 80,000 patients are affected by sepsis, the mortality rate being around forty to sixty percent. Despite the fact that blood poisoning is a common disease, its diagnosis occurs often too late and due to unspecific symptoms. The pathogenesis of sepsis is still poorly understood.

Therefore, the German Sepsis Society promotes basic research in the field of sepsis. Created in 2002, the Hugo Schottmüller Prize award recompenses medical researchers for excellent publications related to the pathogenesis of blood poisoning. The German physician Hugo Schottmüller was first defining sepsis as a disease in 1914. The winner of the Schottmüller Prize receives EUR 4.000, funded by the SIRS-Lab GmbH in Jena.

Due to the large number of high-quality publications submitted this year, the jury decided to assign the prize equally to Dr. Niels Riedemann, surgeon at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor and to Dr. Philipp Henneke, employed at the Children's Hospital of Albert Ludwig University, Freiburg.

Niels Riedemann (born in 1971) received the prize for his publication "Regulation by C5a of Neutrophil Activation during Sepsis", published in Immunity. Riedemann revealed the immunological mechanism of sepsis induced by blind gut surgery. Philipp Henneke (born in 1966) convinced the jury with his paper "Cellular Activation, Phagocytosis, and Bactericidal Activity Against Group B Streptococcus Involve Parallel Myeloid Differentiation Factor 88-Dependent and Independent Signaling Pathways", which appeared in The Journal of Immunology. Henneke investigated the pathways by which bacteria (Streptococcus) cause sepsis in newborns.