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Review
. 2022 Jan 19;12(2):92.
doi: 10.3390/metabo12020092.

Infection Biomarkers Based on Metabolomics

Rúben Araújo  1 , Luís F N Bento  2   3 , Tiago A H Fonseca  1 , Cristiana P Von Rekowski  1 , Bernardo Ribeiro da Cunha  1 , Cecília R C Calado  4
Affiliations
Review

Infection Biomarkers Based on Metabolomics

Rúben Araújo et al. Metabolites. .

Abstract

Current infection biomarkers are highly limited since they have low capability to predict infection in the presence of confounding processes such as in non-infectious inflammatory processes, low capability to predict disease outcomes and have limited applications to guide and evaluate therapeutic regimes. Therefore, it is critical to discover and develop new and effective clinical infection biomarkers, especially applicable in patients at risk of developing severe illness and critically ill patients. Ideal biomarkers would effectively help physicians with better patient management, leading to a decrease of severe outcomes, personalize therapies, minimize antibiotics overuse and hospitalization time, and significantly improve patient survival. Metabolomics, by providing a direct insight into the functional metabolic outcome of an organism, presents a highly appealing strategy to discover these biomarkers. The present work reviews the desired main characteristics of infection biomarkers, the main metabolomics strategies to discover these biomarkers and the next steps for developing the area towards effective clinical biomarkers.

Keywords: biomarkers; diagnosis; infection; metabolomics; prognosis.

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Conflict of interest statement

The authors declare that no conflict of interest exists.

Figures

Figure 1
Figure 1
Types of infection Biomarkers according to the clinical problem.
Figure 2
Figure 2
Metabolomics function modes (untargeted, targeted, and metabolic pathway analysis) towards biomarkers discovery.
See this image and copyright information in PMC

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