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Updated: Aug 17, 2026

Intravenous Endotoxin Challenge in Healthy Humans: An Experimental Platform to Investigate and Modulate Systemic Inflammation
Published on: May 16, 2016
Endotoxin: the uninvited guest
Maud B Gorbet1, Michael V Sefton
1Department of Chemical Engineering, McMaster University, Hamilton, Ontario, Canada.
Abstract:
In the laboratory environment where biomaterials are synthesized and their biocompatibility assessed, we find that endotoxin contamination is hard to avoid and must not be ignored. In those relatively few cases where endotoxin was known to be present, it has been clearly shown that endotoxin can significantly affect the biological response observed and hence confound any effect of the material. This short review explains what endotoxin is, how to test for it and remove it and what its effect on the biological response to biomaterials is. We advocate routine testing of endotoxin on biomaterials and of reagents used in experimental evaluation of biomaterials and this should be the responsibility of every scientist to ensure the validity of any biomaterial study.
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