Welcome

... to the 10th Weimar Sepsis Update of the German Sepsis Society (GSS)!

According to the World Health Organization (WHO), approx. 5% of symptomatic patients with a SARS-CoV-2 infection develop a critical COVID-19 disease with respiratory failure, shock, or multiorgan dysfunction and 14% develop a severe disease with dyspnea, hypoxia, or more than 50% lung involvement on imaging. 

This is, why we have decided to give COVID-19 research a place it deserves in intensive care medicine. The COVID-19 pandemic dominates the research agenda of intensive care physicians, microbiologists, immunologists and epidemiologists worldwide. While the traditional respiratory management of acute lung failure was in the foreground at the beginning of the pandemic, the pathophysiology of COVID-19 associated ARDS is now increasingly better understood. It became clear that beyond a systemic response there is a more compartmentalized inflammatory response in COVID-19 and adjuvant immunomodulatory strategies might improve outcome. 

While prevention and vaccination strategies are currently in the foreground of (research) political and media agendas, clinical research for an evidence-based management of severe and critical COVID-19 disease is rather neglected. Up to date, a total of 6.417 COVID-19 related studies are registered. Among them are 3.706 interventional trials with more than 50% that didn’t even start recruitment and only 97 studies published results so far (https://covid19.trialstracker.net/, as assessed by Feb 17,2021).

There is no progress in this pandemic without national and international research cooperation in phase III trials. This is why the major breakthroughs in treatment were created by three large investigator-initiated study groups that are unprecedented in the history of modern critical care medicine: SOLIDARITY from the WHO, RECOVERY from NHS England and REMAP-CAP from the EU, Canada, Australia and the US. Furthermore, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) announced the Accelerating COVID-19 Therapeutic Interventions and Vaccines (ACTIV) public-private partnership to develop a coordinated research strategy for prioritizing and speeding development of the most promising treatments and vaccines.

These study groups recruited ten thousands of patients in record time under the most difficult of conditions. The leading representatives of these study groups will report on the latest results of their work in Weimar.

Furthermore, results from phase II/III treatment and vaccination studies of the pharmaceutical industry, as well as results by diagnostic companys are expected by September 2021 and will be presented.

Another focus of our congress will be the Surviving Sepsis Guidelines 2021, which are about to be completed.

Get up to date on the current state of knowledge, top publications from top researchers in basic and clinical research. We plan the congress as a face-to-face event, because that is our characteristic - get together, discuss without limits and enjoy!