CU Anschutz Study Uses Blood ‘Omics’ to Predict Trauma Recovery Days Ahead

Overview

• The Science Translational Medicine paper profiles plasma proteomics and metabolomics to define molecular endotypes that forecast ICU stay, organ failure risk, and mortality.
• The discovery cohort included 118 severely injured patients and 97 healthy controls with more than 1,400 biomarkers measured across 11 time points after ICU admission.
• Validation in an independent cohort of roughly 300-plus trauma patients confirmed strong predictive performance that surpassed traditional risk-factor models.
• Coverage reports accuracy between 86% and 92% in validation, compared with about 57% for conventional approaches, highlighting a substantial performance gap.
• Researchers are working to translate the profiling into rapid point-of-care tests for emergency and military settings and are preparing related clinical efforts, including a planned U.S. fibrinogen supplementation trial.