Sepsis genomics: Stepping forward toward sepsis prevention?

Abstract

The era of personalized medicine has already begun and now it is time to initiate personalized prevention strategies against diseases. Infectious diseases have a higher mortality than any other illness, especially in developing countries. Among newborns and young children the situation is even worse. The microorganisms are becoming resistant to almost all known antibiotics. Hence, it is imperative to improve the preventive strategies against infections. ′Pathogens are everywhere, but not every individual is getting diseased,′ - this basic logical thinking needs to look into the genetic predisposition/host susceptibility to sepsis. Interestingly, genetic studies have shown that the type of infecting organism, outcome of infections, and mortality can be predetermined by analyzing an individual′s genome. Exploration of inter-individual genetic variations and their association with sepsis will help in the development of new prognostic markers to provide novel personalized therapeutics and predict the outcome. In this review article, we discuss the genetic variations and their association with sepsis, studied by various researchers in different regions.

Keywords

• Diagnostic
• genetic association
• genomics
• prognostic marker
• sepsis