TY - JOUR PY - 2021// TI - "Omics" in traumatic brain injury: novel approaches to a complex disease JO - Acta neurochirurgica A1 - Abu Hamdeh, Sami A1 - Tenovuo, Olli A1 - Peul, Wilco A1 - Marklund, Niklas SP - ePub EP - ePub VL - ePub IS - ePub N2 - BACKGROUND: To date, there is neither any pharmacological treatment with efficacy in traumatic brain injury (TBI) nor any method to halt the disease progress. This is due to an incomplete understanding of the vast complexity of the biological cascades and failure to appreciate the diversity of secondary injury mechanisms in TBI. In recent years, techniques for high-throughput characterization and quantification of biological molecules that include genomics, proteomics, and metabolomics have evolved and referred to as omics.

METHODS: In this narrative review, we highlight how omics technology can be applied to potentiate diagnostics and prognostication as well as to advance our understanding of injury mechanisms in TBI.

RESULTS: The omics platforms provide possibilities to study function, dynamics, and alterations of molecular pathways of normal and TBI disease states. Through advanced bioinformatics, large datasets of molecular information from small biological samples can be analyzed in detail and provide valuable knowledge of pathophysiological mechanisms, to include in prognostic modeling when connected to clinically relevant data. In such a complex disease as TBI, omics enables broad categories of studies from gene compositions associated with susceptibility to secondary injury or poor outcome, to potential alterations in metabolites following TBI.

CONCLUSION: The field of omics in TBI research is rapidly evolving. The recent data and novel methods reviewed herein may form the basis for improved precision medicine approaches, development of pharmacological approaches, and individualization of therapeutic efforts by implementing mathematical "big data" predictive modeling in the near future.

Language: en

LA - en SN - 0001-6268 UR - http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s00701-021-04928-7 ID - ref1 ER -