Improving clinical outcomes in sepsis and multiple organ dysfunction through precision medicine

Sepsis is an ancient syndrome, as the term “sipo” (‘‘I rot’’ in Greek) was first used in a medical sense in the poems of Homer (1). Two thousand and seven hundred years later, sepsis remains a serious human disease with significant morbidity and mortality. Moreover, sepsis is increasingly common due to an aging population with multiple co-morbid illnesses that are being more aggressively treated with surgery and multiple complex therapies, including biologic and immunosuppressive therapies such as cancer chemotherapy (2-5).