Early Diagnosis of Sepsis: Is an Integrated Omics Approach the Way Forward?

Sepsis remains one of the leading causes of death in the USA and it is expected to get worse as the population ages. Moreover, the standard of care, which recommends aggressive treatment with appropriate antibiotics, has led to an increase in multiple drug-resistant organisms. There is a dire need for the development of new antibiotics, improved antibiotic stewardship, and therapies that treat the host response. Development of new sepsis therapeutics has been a disappointment as no drugs are currently approved to treat the various complications from sepsis. Much of the failure has been blamed on animal models that do not accurately reflect the course of the disease. However, recent improvements in metabolomic, transcriptomic, genomic, and proteomic platforms have allowed for a broad-spectrum look at molecular changes in the host response using clinical samples. Integration of these multi-omic datasets allows researchers to perform systems biology approaches to identify novel pathophysiology of the disease. In this review, we highlight what is currently known about sepsis and how integrative omics has identified new diagnostic and predictive models of sepsis as well as novel mechanisms. These changes may improve patient care as well as guide future preclinical analysis of sepsis.