CAG Centre for Endotheliomics

The CAG Center for Endotheliomics focusses on the endothelium’s function and role in acute critical illness and seeks to lower mortality rates among patients with multi-organ failure. Multi-organ failure in critically ill patients follows shock caused by trauma, blood poisoning or resuscitation after cardiac arrest. Multi-organ failure is caused by damage to the endothelium with failing blood flow and thus failing oxygen supply to vital organs.

In Europe, more than 1 million critically ill patients die of multi-organ failure each year, and in Denmark alone more than 7,500 out of 31,000 intensive-care patients die each year. Improved diagnosis and treatment of the most critically ill patients in Danish hospitals will have a significant positive effect on survival rates.

The CAG seeks to improve survival rates of critically ill patients via precision diagnostics and treatment of multi-organ failure by uncovering how the endothelium function of the individual patient can lead to multi-organ failure or, at worst, death.

The CAG brings clinical experts in trauma, blood poisoning and cardiac arrest treatment together with experts in systems biology, bioengineering and bioinformatics. Together they will – using omics technologies and mathematical modelling of the metabolism of the endothelial cell – provide new knowledge of its role in critical illness and multi-organ failure, identify diagnostic markers of the individual patient’s endothelial phenotype and thus open up new possibilities for targeted precision treatment.

The new knowledge will be based on both genome-scale metabolic models enabling mathematical modelling of the function of the endothelial cell in critical illness and bioinformatics analysis, which together will offer new knowledge and tools for use in clinical practice.

Training and Competency Development

The CAG Center for Endotheliomics draws on a series of medical specialties within acute critical illness and cooperates closely with systems biologists and bioinformaticians. Training and knowledge sharing will take the form of PhD courses for students at the PhD schools at the Technical University of Denmark and the University of Copenhagen as well as courses and seminars for clinicians and healthcare personnel within the involved specialties.