Shedding metabo'light' on the search for sepsis biomarkers

The clinical presentation of severe infection with generalized inflammation is similar, if not identical, to systemic inflammation induced by sterile tissue injury. Novel models and unbiased technologies are urgently needed for biomarker identification and disease profiling in sepsis. Here we briefly review the article of Kamisoglu and colleagues in this issue of Critical Care on comparing metabolomics data from different studies to assess whether responses elicited by endotoxin recapitulate, at least in part, those seen in clinical sepsis.