Critical care mostly implies life-threatening situations involving systemic infection, inflammation and necrosis. Biofluids are an easily accessible source of liquid biopsies that can be used to monitor the evolution of the patient’s critical illness. The cellular and molecular profiling of necrosis and inflammation in biofluids using cutting-edge technologies such as realtime immunodiagnostics, next-generation sequencing and mass spectrometry will pave the way for precision medicine v2.0 in critical care. This is needed for data mining approaches to allow patientclustering, identify novel biomarkers and develop novel intervention strategies controlling necrosis and inflammation. The real-time monitoring of biomarkers will allow continued (re)evaluation of treatment strategies using machine learning models.
- Tom Vanden Berghe
- Eric Hoste