A multidisciplinary team of scientists — including two UC Santa Barbara faculty members — is poised to undertake a major biomedical research initiative focused on the escalating problem of sepsis, the body’s abnormal response to severe infections.

Jamey Marth, director of UCSB’s Center for Nanomedicine (CNM) and also a professor of the Sanford Burnham Prebys Medical Discovery Institute (SBP) in La Jolla, has been awarded a five-year, $12.8 million research grant from the National Institutes of Health (NIH). Increasingly rare, these large awards are structured to fund the best multi-investigator programs using a team approach to solving an important biological and medical problem.

“We were delighted to learn that the NIH reviewed our application as having ‘high potential to radically change the way we understand and treat sepsis,’” said Marth, who is also UCSB’s Carbon Professor of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology and the Mellichamp Professor of Systems Biology. “Millions of people are diagnosed with sepsis each year worldwide, and on average 30 percent die from the complications of sepsis. No new effective treatments have been developed in decades.”