Biomarkers in Pediatric ARDS: Future Directions

Orwoll, Benjamin E.; Sapru, Anil

Technologies like these can help overcome a major challenge pARDS research, which is the overall paucity of data. However, this will also require a concerted effort toward collaboration between many researchers and institutions to expand the available pool of data. The systems of incentives in place for funding and promotion must also be reexamined to support collaborative research in addition to individual projects. Research groups, such as the Pediatric Acute Lung Injury and Sepsis Investigators 1 and the Collaborative Pediatric Critical Care Research Network, 2 among others, must continue to expand and share their databases of biomarker data to facilitate new insights and generate hypotheses for new clinical trials. Larger data sets may allow for improvements in sensitivity and specificity, as well as expand the external validity of, known biomarkers such that meaningful clinical tools or scores could be developed around them. However, in order to make use of these large data sets pediatric researchers will need to embrace the growing field of biomedical informatics. Large-scale information analysis can utilize complex algorithms and machine learning to efficiently detect patterns and subpopulations that would be otherwise invisible with conventional techniques. However, this requires dedicated resources and data access that is best suited to collaborative networks. No pARDS biomarker has yet achieved the clinical utility of creatinine for 1 www.palisi.org 2 www.cpccrn.org kidney injury or troponin for myocardial infarction, but with large-scale collaboration and data analysis the chance of success grows dramatically.