About GRID

The Giessen Research center in Infectious Diseases (GRID) provides a platform for functional genomics on critical illness due to severe infection or traumatic injury. Mortality due to sepsis, septic shock asnd septic organ failure remain unacceptably high and have not improved substantially over the past twenty years. The interplay between microbial attack and host immune and inflammatory response is incompletely understood. It is estimated that approximately 1% of all hospitalized patients are diagnosed with septic shock every year with mortality rates of 30-40%. This translates into more than 100.000 cases of deaths due to critical illness every year in Germany.

Septic shock due to severe infection or traumatic injury is often complicated by organ failure syndromes that cause substantial morbidity and death. Current evidence indicates that host inflammatory responses play a central role in the development of these syndromic conditions which include septic shock, acute respiratory distress syndrome, acute renal and hepatic failure, myocardial dysfunction, coagulopathic states and encephalopathy. Alone and cumulatively, each organ failure syndrome increases the risk of death even after successful treatment of the underlying infection or injury. Despite substantial effort in this area, treatment regimens directed at a single target or an inflammatory pathway has met with little success in affecting outcomes of critically ill patients.

Recent advances in computational biology and high-throughput technologies (e.g. microarrays, highly parallel single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) analysis and proteomics) have generated considerable interest in developing a more global understanding of complex biological systems. The application of these technologies to critical illness offers the potential to define aberrant programs of gene expression induced by infection, trauma or other inflammatory triggers and to detect biomarkers and genetic polymorphisms that are associated with these responses. Based on information derived for these investigations new strategies for diagnostics and catergorization of patients with repect to infection status and the inflammatory host responses will be developed. Fundamental molecular and cellular pathologic characteristics of disease will be linked with clinical aspects of infection. Importantly, these tools provide a means to discover novel gene functions and relationships and to identify potential therapeutic targets.

Such investigations present major challenges regarding the multifaceted demands that these methods place on resources and experimental designs. Many of the biological and analytic methods have yet to be established thus presenting problems of data sharing and the development of common databases. Thus the effort here links transdiscplinary, multi-institutional efforts to initiate an organizational and investigative framework to optimize resource utilization and data accrual.