Biological Phenotyping in Sepsis and Acute Respiratory Distress Syndrome.

Heterogeneity in sepsis and acute respiratory distress syndrome (ARDS) is increasingly being recognized as one of the principal barriers to finding efficacious targeted therapies. The advent of multiple high-throughput biological data ("omics"), coupled with the widespread access to increased computational power, has led to the emergence of phenotyping in critical care. Phenotyping aims to use a multitude of data to identify homogenous subgroups within an otherwise heterogenous population. Increasingly, phenotyping schema are being applied to sepsis and ARDS to increase understanding of these clinical conditions and identify potential therapies. Here we present a selective review of the biological phenotyping schema applied to sepsis and ARDS. Further, we outline some of the challenges involved in translating these conceptual findings to bedside clinical decision-making tools. Expected final online publication date for the Annual Review of Medicine, Volume 74 is January 2023. Please see http://www.annualreviews.org/page/journal/pubdates for revised estimates.