Tom van der Poll

Tom van der Poll specialises in sepsis. A violent reaction to infection, sepsis puts around ten thousand people in the Netherlands in intensive care every year, a quarter of whom die as a result. Treatment is complicated by the many causes of sepsis, ranging from pneumonia to an intestinal puncture, and by the varying responses of the immune system. After twenty years of unsuccessful research, Tom van der Poll and his colleagues have advocated investigating whether sepsis patients can be divided into different subgroups, the ultimate aim being to arrive at a specific treatment for each type of sepsis. Based on the composition of all 22,000 RNA molecules in patient blood cells, Van der Poll is now studying whether changes have taken place in certain pathways of the immune response system in specific sepsis patient subgroups. Theoretically, this would make it possible to develop a specific course of immunotherapy for each subgroup.