The Clot Thickens

The suspected connection between coagulation and inflammation that leads to sepsis has been elucidated with the discovery of a signaling pathway that links the two. Dendritic cells turn out to be the key carriers of the coagulation-triggered inflammatory cue.

The notoriously difficult field of sepsis therapeutics may get a boost from a study in Nature that lays out one of several possible paths to the disease from blood clotting to inflammation.¹ The findings tie together a number of earlier hints at how a runaway cycle of coagulation-driven immune activation leads to systemic inflammation and septic shock...