1. Sign our petition calling on Cochrane to withdraw their review of Exercise Therapy for 'CFS'.
    Dismiss Notice
  2. Guest, the 'News in Brief' for the week beginning 21st April 2025 is here.
    Dismiss Notice
  3. Welcome! Read the Core Purpose and Values of our forum.
    Dismiss Notice

Deciphering sepsis: transforming diagnosis and treatment through systems immunology, 2025, Hancock et al.

Discussion in 'Long Covid research' started by SNT Gatchaman, Mar 21, 2025.

Tags:
  1. SNT Gatchaman

    SNT Gatchaman Senior Member (Voting Rights) Staff Member

    Messages:
    6,688
    Location:
    Aotearoa New Zealand
    Deciphering sepsis: transforming diagnosis and treatment through systems immunology
    Hancock, Robert E. W.; An, Andy; dos Santos, Claudia C.; Lee, Amy H. Y.

    Sepsis is an abnormal, life-threatening response to infection that leads to (multi-)organ dysfunction and failure. It causes ~20% of deaths worldwide each year, and most deaths related to severe COVID-19 share various molecular features with sepsis. Current treatment approaches (antimicrobials and supportive care) do not address the complexity of sepsis or its mechanistic heterogeneity between and within patients over time.

    Systems immunology methods, including multiomics (notably RNA sequencing transcriptomics), machine learning, and network biology analysis, have the potential to transform the management paradigm toward precision approaches. Immune dysfunctions evident very early in sepsis drive the development of novel diagnostic gene expression signatures (e.g., cellular reprogramming) that could inform early therapy.

    Sepsis patients can now be categorized into “endotypes” based on unique immune dysfunction mechanisms corresponding to varying severity and mortality rates, raising the prospect of endotype-specific diagnostics and patient-specific immune-directed therapy. Longitudinal within-patient analyses can also reveal mechanisms (including epigenetics) that drive differential sepsis trajectories over time, enabling the prospect of disease stage-specific therapy during and after hospitalization, including for post-sepsis and long COVID syndromes.

    Achieving this transformation will require addressing barriers to systems immunology research, including its cost and resource-intensiveness, the relatively low volume of available data, and lack of suitable animal models; it will also require a change in the mindset of healthcare providers toward precision approaches. This should be prioritized in multistakeholder collaborations involving research communities, healthcare providers/systems, patients, and governments to reduce the current high disease burden from sepsis and to mitigate against future pandemics.


    Link | PDF (Frontiers in Science) [Open Access]
     
    SNT Gatchaman, Mar 21, 2025
    #1
  2. SNT Gatchaman

    SNT Gatchaman Senior Member (Voting Rights) Staff Member

    Messages:
    6,688
    Location:
    Aotearoa New Zealand
    SNT Gatchaman, Mar 21, 2025
    #2
  3. Jonathan Edwards

    Jonathan Edwards Senior Member (Voting Rights)

    Messages:
    17,070
    Location:
    London, UK
    The abstract is just another string buzzwords without any evidence or novel argument as far as I can see. If anything it muddles up different things.

    I continue to be convinced that terms like 'systems immunology' are only ever used by people who do not actually understand complex systems dynamics, which has been a key element of biomedical science for decades and does not need a new name.
     
    Jonathan Edwards, Mar 21, 2025
    #3
    alktipping likes this.
  4. Utsikt

    Utsikt Senior Member (Voting Rights)

    Messages:
    2,558
    Location:
    Norway
    This section reads like a business management report!

    It seems like they are trying to position themselves for grants and funding.

    Overall, we conclude that, regardless of the causative agent, sepsis has been a major factor in past and recent pandemics and will likely be a strong factor in the most severe forms of disease in future pandemics. Thus, novel diagnostic tools and drugs are urgently needed, not only to reduce the current, enormous global burden of sepsis, but also to avoid the medical calamity seen in the COVID-19 pandemic.

    Such “pathogen-agnostic” measures could efficiently treat severe disease outcomes even before a pandemic pathogen has been identified and pathogen-specific diagnostics and therapies have been developed. This transformational concept should be at the heart of plans to mitigate against future pandemics; it should be a priority for the research community, healthcare systems, and ultimately governments when providing funding support. In addition to these insights, collaborations between scientists, physicians, and other healthcare providers, and most importantly patients and their families, should be initiated in order to deliver stakeholder-focused solutions. Pandemic preparedness is at the heart of many broad plans, including from the European Union (121), World Bank (122), and WHO (123), but concerningly none of these mention sepsis. Given the current limitations involved in studying sepsis (heterogeneity and the consequent requirement for precision approaches, lack of suitable animal models, and modest investment), it is specifically recommended that relevant stakeholders should come together (possibly under the banner of organizations such as the Surviving Sepsis campaign or the Global Sepsis Alliance) to establish an aggressive and fundable program to address these deficiencies. Recently, the 2030 Global Agenda for Sepsis (124) was launched as a multistakeholder strategic vision aimed at alleviating the significant human, societal, healthcare, and economic burden of sepsis. This multi-year strategic vision aims to reduce the global incidence of sepsis by at least 25%, improve survival rates by over 20%, and reduce the median costs per sepsis patient by 20% from 2017–2020 baselines. Its five strategic pillars include research and innovation specifically mentioning precision medicine to address heterogeneity, together with political leadership and multilateral cooperation, health system readiness, a “whole-of-society response”, and sepsis in pandemics and other emergencies.

    Given the unique and data-driven insights offered by systems immunology, the approaches described here should form the foundation for research and innovation.

    The article is among the top 1 % on terms of readers and it was cited twice on the day it was published:
     
    Utsikt, Mar 21, 2025
    #4
    alktipping likes this.

Share This Page