Prof.

Your role in the project: 
Principal Investigator
Assessment of your participation: 
Multiscale approach to the identification of molecural biomakers in acute Heart failure induced by shock http://www.shockomics.org/home SHOCKOMICS project has an ambitious clinical aim in intensive care. The management of cardiovascular stability in shock patients is of paramount importance in critical care. New, cutting edge knowledge is necessary to overcome the shortcomings of available therapies, in order to cope with the challenges that anesthesiologists, intensive care specialists and emergency physicians face when dealing with shock patients. Current therapies are targeted to reduce symptoms of shock and multiple organ failure, but they are unable to target the root cause or to act at the “beginning of the cascade”, because of the lack of a model explaining the molecular basis of shock induced tissue injury and ensuing multiple organ failure. Hence, the effectiveness of anti-hypotensive interventions such as fluid resuscitation is limited. Fluid may restore blood pressure within minutes, but complications such as pulmonary edema may arise on a longer time scale in patients who are unresponsive to fluid infusion, and cause more severe stress to the patient’s hemodynamic stability, respiratory efficiency, and immune system. This is a highly interdiciplinary project that combines Medicine, Biology, Bioinformatics, ICT and Bioengineering This proposal seeks to shed light on the molecular trigger of acute heart failure in association to shock, in the presence of uncontrolled proteolytic activity, in order to identify inflammatory mediators and markers which are activated in shock, through a systematic analysis of expression levels of genes and their protein products, and novel targets for the delivery of new therapies, necessary to overcome the limitations of current ones. The project aims to investigate many datasets including three shock classes: Septic Shock (SS), Cardiogenic Shock (CS), Haemorragic Shock (HS) Existing bio-banks (SS) ; Clinical (SS, CS, HS); Swine Shock models (SS, CS, HS); Rat Shock models (SS, HS) and In-Vitro Studies on Cardiomyocytes. Diagnostics and Therapy: Biomarkers from blood/plasma samples (Genomics, Transcriptomics, Proteomics, Metabolomics) and Hemodynamic recordings will be addressed in humans, animals, and in-vitro. Next, effects of proteolysis inhibitors will be studied in animals and in-vitro. The project consortium includes organisations from Barcelona, Brussels, Geneva, Lausanne, Milan, San Diego
Your organisation: 
POLITECNICO DI MILANO