Lay summary
Acute diseases (ADs) are a common and global concern which include sepsis, pancreatitis, bleeding and shock. People die from ADs by failure of vital organs. For this there is no specific treatment, only organ support in intensive care units. Our experimental studies have confirmed that lymph draining from the gut to the bloodstream causes distant organ dysfunction and we have discovered a number of factors in the gut-lymph that are toxic to cells and organs. The objectives of this pre-clinical project are to develop methods to deliver drugs to target this gut-lymph toxicity, identify effective candidate treatments to treat two experimental ADs and develop a human model to confirm that drugs enter gut-lymph and are released. The clinical and economic benefits of this will be far-reaching by introducing a new treatment paradigm to reduce the severity of ADs and the risk of multiple organ dysfunction syndrome (MODS) and death.