Exploring the Differential Immune Responses in Community-Acquired Sepsis through Plasma Mediators and Immune Cell Analysis

Sepsis remains a major global health burden with high mortality and limited therapeutic options beyond supportive care. The current treatment approaches often fail to save sepsis patients, highlighting the urgent need to deepen our understanding of the immune system’s role in the disease. Advancing immune research could enable the development of novel, targeted therapies that potentially reduce healthcare costs, save and improve the quality of millions of lives. Today, supportive interventions including quick antibiotic delivery, efficient source control, and organ support are crucial to the therapy of sepsis. Despite their need, these tactics frequently fail to increase survival because they ignore immunological dysregulation, which is crucial to the development of sepsis. Identifying subgroups and various endotypes within patients with distinctive immune profiles will provide chances for focused treatment approaches.

This study aims to characterize the immune profiles of patients with community-acquired sepsis, to understand the temporal changes in immune response and identify distinct immunological patterns that may benefit from precision interventions. This is a prospective, observational study enrolling patients with community-acquired sepsis from a tertiary care hospital in South India. Peripheral blood samples will be collected from the critically ill patients with sepsis and sterile inflammation at three time points. Healthy individuals will also be recruited for the baseline establishment. Clinical and demographic data will be collected from all the recruited study subjects. Plasma cytokine and chemokine levels will be analyzed using Luminex multiplex assays to profile dynamic changes in immune parameters. Immune cell populations, including T cells, B cells, NK cells, and monocytes, will be quantified from isolated PBMCs using flow cytometry, with a focus on temporal variations and group-specific immune patterns. Identifying distinct immune signatures and temporal patterns in sepsis will enhance our understanding of disease heterogeneity and support the development of stratified immunomodulatory therapies.