Challenges
Strategies to develop effective adjuvant treatments for sepsis face serious challenges. Sepsis patients exhibit striking heterogeneity not only with respect to the source of infection and the causative pathogens, but also regarding age, genetic background, comorbidities, chronic medication, and life style. Consequently, sepsis patients face a wide variability in their risk of death as well as in the benefit they can potentially derive from a given therapy. This highlights the need for improved stratification systems to facilitate targeting therapy to those patients who are most likely to benefit. Efficient and rapid point-of-care diagnostic systems are required to provide a basis for early diagnosis and targeted intervention.