Personalised immunotherapy in sepsis: a scoping review protocol.

Introduction: Sepsis, a life-threatening organ dysfunction syndrome occurring in the context of severe infections, remains a major burden on global health with high morbidity and high mortality rates. Despite recent advances in the understanding of its pathophysiology, the treatment of sepsis remains supportive of nature with few interventions specifically designed for treating this complex syndrome. The focus of sepsis trials has increasingly shifted towards targeting excessive inflammation and immunosuppression using immunomodulatory agents. However, it remains uncertain how to identify patients that could benefit from such treatment, whether treatments can be tailored to an individual's immune profile, or at which stage of the disease the intervention should be initiated. In this scoping review, we provide a comprehensive overview of current available literature on immunostimulatory and immunosuppressive therapies against sepsis.
Methods and Analysis: The aim of this scoping review is to describe and summarise current literature evaluating immunotherapy in adult patients with sepsis. The review will be performed using the framework formulated by Arksey and O'Malley. A comprehensive literature and study collection will be executed by searching PubMed, Embase, Cochrane CENTRAL and ClinicalTrials.gov to identify clinical trials and cohort studies concerning immunotherapy in adult patients with sepsis. Screening will be performed independently and in duplicate by two reviewers who will also independently extract data into prespecified spreadsheets. We will summarise evidence in tabular format with descriptive statistics. The reported evidence will convey knowledge on the types of immunotherapies studied, and currently being studied, in adult patients with sepsis.
Ethics and Dissemination: Approval from a medical ethics committee is not required. Once completed, the review will be submitted for publication in a peer-reviewed journal. These results will be of value to clinicians and researchers with an interest in advancing sepsis care.
Competing Interests: Competing interests: SJWO reports grants and/or contracts from Physician Services Incorporated Ontario and Canadian Institutes of Health Research, and support from the American Thoracic Society and the European Respiratory Society. MGN reports an ERC Advanced Grant, a Spinoza Grant and is on the scientific advisory board of SOBI. PP is on the DSMB of the IL-7 trial ‘ILEAD’. EJG-B reports grants and/or contracts from Abbott CH, bioMerieux, MSD, Sobi and ThermoFisher BRAHMS. MCAM is on the DSMB of the PACER trial and the National Dutch Guideline on anticoagulation in COVID-19. TvdP reports project grants from the European Commission and is on the DSMBs of RECAP-CAP, SuDDICU and the CONFIDENT trial. WJW reports a project grant from ZonMW/NWO and receives consulting fees from Merck, Sobi and GlaxoSmithKline. APJV receives consulting fees from InflaRx.
(© Author(s) (or their employer(s)) 2022. Re-use permitted under CC BY. Published by BMJ.)