Specific hemoperfusion therapy

We have developed a hemoperfusion technique in which whole blood pervades a nonblood-destructive sorbent to remove toxic components. Our technique requires only access for blood egress and return, a blood pump, a cartridge containing the sorbent, and standard blood inflow and outflow sets, all of which should be available in an emergency room or dialysis unit. Nonspecific sorbents have been used for hemoperfusion, but we confine our discussion here to hemoperfusion techniques to which we have introduced a novel specific sorbent system. We have designed, developed, and fabricated a novel adsorbent system that consists of crosslinked polyacrolein microspheres encapsulated in agarose (APAMB). Convalently bound to the microspheres are ligands such as an antibody specific for a given antigen (or vice versa). If available, a specific nonantibody ligand can be used, such as deferoxamine for iron, or the microspheres themselves may possess chelating properties, that is, polymercaptals. Any protein or antigen attached to a carrier containing free amino groups may be bound covalently to the microspheres through the latter's aldehyde groups. We describe several of the model systems we examined during our research.