Project description:Acute kidney injury (AKI) currently is diagnosed by a temporal trend of a single blood analyte: serum creatinine. This measurement is neither sensitive nor specific to kidney injury or its protean forms. Newer biomarkers, neutrophil gelatinase-associated lipocalin (NGAL, Lipocalin 2, Siderocalin), or kidney injury molecule-1 (KIM-1, Hepatitis A Virus Cellular Receptor 1), accelerate the diagnosis of AKI as well as prospectively distinguish rapidly reversible from prolonged causes of serum creatinine increase. Nonetheless, these biomarkers lack the capacity to subfractionate AKI further (eg, sepsis versus ischemia versus nephrotoxicity from medications, enzymes, or metals) or inform us about the primary and secondary sites of injury. It also is unknown whether all nephrons are injured in AKI, whether all cells in a nephron are affected, and whether injury responses can be stimulus-specific or cell type-specific or both. In this review, we summarize fully agnostic tissue interrogation approaches that may help to redefine AKI in cellular and molecular terms, including single-cell and single-nuclei RNA sequencing technology. These approaches will empower a shift in the current paradigm of AKI diagnosis, classification, and staging, and provide the renal community with a significant advance toward precision medicine in the analysis AKI.
Project description:Sepsis is a leading cause of morbidity and mortality in critically ill children, and acute kidney injury (AKI) is a frequent complication that confers an increased risk for poor outcomes. Despite the documented consequences of sepsis-associated AKI (SA-AKI), no effective disease-modifying therapies have been identified to date. As such, the only treatment options for these patients remain prevention and supportive care, both of which rely on the ability to promptly and accurately identify at risk and affected individuals. To achieve these goals, a variety of biomarkers have been investigated to help augment our currently limited predictive and diagnostic strategies for SA-AKI, however, these have had variable success in pediatric sepsis. In this mini-review, we will briefly outline the current use of biomarkers for SA-AKI, and propose a new framework for biomarker discovery and utilization that considers the individual patient's sepsis inflammatory response. Now recognized to be a key driver in the complex pathophysiology of SA-AKI, understanding the dysregulated host immune response to sepsis is a growing area of research that can and should be leveraged to improve the prediction and diagnosis of SA-AKI, while also potentially identifying novel therapeutic targets. Reframing SA-AKI in this manner - as a direct consequence of the individual patient's sepsis inflammatory response - will facilitate a precision medicine approach to its management, something that is required to move the care of this consequential disorder forward.
Project description:Precision medicine has captured the imagination of the medical community with visions of therapies precisely targeted to the specific individual's genetic, biological, social, and environmental profile. However, in practice it has become synonymous with genomic medicine. As such its successes have been limited, with poor predictive or clinical value for the majority of people. It adds little to lifestyle medicine, other than in establishing why a healthy lifestyle is effective in combatting chronic disease. The challenge of lifestyle medicine remains getting people to actually adopt, sustain, and naturalize a healthy lifestyle, and this will require an approach that treats the patient as a person with individual needs and providing them with suitable types of support. The future of lifestyle medicine is holistic and person-centered rather than technological.
Project description:Objective. Spinal cord injury (SCI) is a devastating neurological disorder caused by trauma. Pathophysiological events occurring after SCI include acute, subacute, and chronic phases, while complex mechanisms are comprised. As an abundant source of natural drugs, Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) attracts much attention in SCI treatment recently. Hence, this review provides an overview of pathophysiology of SCI and TCM application in its therapy. Methods. Information was collected from articles published in peer-reviewed journals via electronic search (PubMed, SciFinder, Google Scholar, Web of Science, and CNKI), as well as from master's dissertations, doctoral dissertations, and Chinese Pharmacopoeia. Results. Both active ingredients and herbs could exert prevention and treatment against SCI, which is linked to antioxidant, anti-inflammatory, neuroprotective, or antiapoptosis effects. The detailed information of six active natural ingredients (i.e., curcumin, resveratrol, epigallocatechin gallate, ligustrazine, quercitrin, and puerarin) and five commonly used herbs (i.e., Danshen, Ginkgo, Ginseng, Notoginseng, and Astragali Radix) was elucidated and summarized. Conclusions. As an important supplementary treatment, TCM may provide benefits in repair of injured spinal cord. With a general consensus that future clinical approaches will be diversified and a combination of multiple strategies, TCM is likely to attract greater attention in SCI treatment.
Project description:Acute kidney injury (AKI) complicates recovery from cardiac surgery in up to 30 % of patients, injures and impairs the function of the brain, lungs, and gut, and places patients at a 5-fold increased risk of death during hospitalization. Renal ischemia, reperfusion, inflammation, hemolysis, oxidative stress, cholesterol emboli, and toxins contribute to the development and progression of AKI. Preventive strategies are limited, but current evidence supports maintenance of renal perfusion and intravascular volume while avoiding venous congestion, administration of balanced salt as opposed to high-chloride intravenous fluids, and the avoidance or limitation of cardiopulmonary bypass exposure. AKI that requires renal replacement therapy occurs in 2-5 % of patients following cardiac surgery and is associated with 50 % mortality. For those who recover from renal replacement therapy or even mild AKI, progression to chronic kidney disease in the ensuing months and years is more likely than for those who do not develop AKI. Cardiac surgery continues to be a popular clinical model to evaluate novel therapeutics, off-label use of existing medications, and nonpharmacologic treatments for AKI, since cardiac surgery is fairly common, typically elective, provides a relatively standardized insult, and patients remain hospitalized and monitored following surgery. More efficient and time-sensitive methods to diagnose AKI are imperative to reduce this negative outcome. The discovery and validation of renal damage biomarkers should in time supplant creatinine-based criteria for the clinical diagnosis of AKI.
Project description:Precision medicine is increasingly recognized as a promising approach to improve disease treatment, taking into consideration the individual clinical and biological characteristics shared by specific subgroups of patients. In specific fields such as oncology and hematology, precision medicine has already started to be implemented in the clinical setting and molecular testing is routinely used to select treatments with higher efficacy and reduced adverse effects. The application of precision medicine in psychiatry is still in its early phases. However, there are already examples of predictive models based on clinical data or combinations of clinical, neuroimaging and biological data. While the power of single clinical predictors would remain inadequate if analyzed only with traditional statistical approaches, these predictors are now increasingly used to impute machine learning models that can have adequate accuracy even in the presence of relatively small sample size. These models have started to be applied to disentangle relevant clinical questions that could lead to a more effective management of psychiatric disorders, such as prediction of response to the mood stabilizer lithium, resistance to antidepressants in major depressive disorder or stratification of the risk and outcome prediction in schizophrenia. In this narrative review, we summarized the most important findings in precision medicine in psychiatry based on studies that constructed machine learning models using clinical, neuroimaging and/or biological data. Limitations and barriers to the implementation of precision psychiatry in the clinical setting, as well as possible solutions and future perspectives, will be presented.
Project description:Precision medicine is based on accurate diagnosis and tailored intervention through the use of omics and clinical data together with epidemiology and environmental exposures. Precision medicine should be achieved with minimum adverse events and maximum efficacy in patients with chronic kidney disease (CKD). In this review, the breakthroughs of omics in CKD and the application of systems biology are reviewed. The potential role of transforming growth factor-?1 in the targeted intervention of renal fibrosis is discussed as an example of how to make precision medicine work for CKD.
Project description:The early prediction of deterioration could have an important role in supporting healthcare professionals, as an estimated 11% of deaths in hospital follow a failure to promptly recognize and treat deteriorating patients1. To achieve this goal requires predictions of patient risk that are continuously updated and accurate, and delivered at an individual level with sufficient context and enough time to act. Here we develop a deep learning approach for the continuous risk prediction of future deterioration in patients, building on recent work that models adverse events from electronic health records2-17 and using acute kidney injury-a common and potentially life-threatening condition18-as an exemplar. Our model was developed on a large, longitudinal dataset of electronic health records that cover diverse clinical environments, comprising 703,782 adult patients across 172 inpatient and 1,062 outpatient sites. Our model predicts 55.8% of all inpatient episodes of acute kidney injury, and 90.2% of all acute kidney injuries that required subsequent administration of dialysis, with a lead time of up to 48 h and a ratio of 2 false alerts for every true alert. In addition to predicting future acute kidney injury, our model provides confidence assessments and a list of the clinical features that are most salient to each prediction, alongside predicted future trajectories for clinically relevant blood tests9. Although the recognition and prompt treatment of acute kidney injury is known to be challenging, our approach may offer opportunities for identifying patients at risk within a time window that enables early treatment.
Project description:Classification of variants of unknown significance is a challenging technical problem in clinical genetics. As up to one-third of disease-causing mutations are thought to affect pre-mRNA splicing, it is important to accurately classify splicing mutations in patient sequencing data. Several consortia and healthcare systems have conducted large-scale patient sequencing studies, which discover novel variants faster than they can be classified. Here, we compare the advantages and limitations of several high-throughput splicing assays aimed at mitigating this bottleneck, and describe a data set of ~5,000 variants that we analyzed using our Massively Parallel Splicing Assay (MaPSy). The Critical Assessment of Genome Interpretation group (CAGI) organized a challenge, in which participants submitted machine learning models to predict the splicing effects of variants in this data set. We discuss the winning submission of the challenge (MMSplice) which outperformed existing software. Finally, we highlight methods to overcome the limitations of MaPSy and similar assays, such as tissue-specific splicing, the effect of surrounding sequence context, classifying intronic variants, synthesizing large exons, and amplifying complex libraries of minigene species. Further development of these assays will greatly benefit the field of clinical genetics, which lack high-throughput methods for variant interpretation.
Project description:Gastrointestinal (GI) cancer has a high tumor incidence and mortality rate worldwide. Despite significant improvements in radiotherapy, chemotherapy, and targeted therapy for GI cancer over the last decade, GI cancer is characterized by high recurrence rates and a dismal prognosis. There is an urgent need for new diagnostic and therapeutic approaches. Recent technological advances and the accumulation of clinical data are moving toward the use of precision medicine in GI cancer. Here we review the application and status of precision medicine in GI cancer. Analyses of liquid biopsy specimens provide comprehensive real-time data of the tumor-associated changes in an individual GI cancer patient with malignancy. With the introduction of gene panels including next-generation sequencing, it has become possible to identify a variety of mutations and genetic biomarkers in GI cancer. Although the genomic aberration of GI cancer is apparently less actionable compared to other solid tumors, novel informative analyses derived from comprehensive gene profiling may lead to the discovery of precise molecular targeted drugs. These progressions will make it feasible to incorporate clinical, genome-based, and phenotype-based diagnostic and therapeutic approaches and apply them to individual GI cancer patients for precision medicine.