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Fig. 2 | Intensive Care Medicine Experimental

Fig. 2

From: Towards a biological definition of ARDS: are treatable traits the solution?

Fig. 2

Biological integration of potential treatable traits. The described domains of biological variation do not exist in isolation of each other (Fig. 1). An individual patient could, therefore, be classified according to a conceptional framework that evaluates the three major components of an alveolar unit (endothelium, interstitium with extra-cellular matrix, and epithelium) and the balance of host response between alveolar and blood compartment [71]. We speculate that the position of an individual, based on information pertaining to these component parts in alveolar fluid relative to the circulation, becomes critical in understanding a patient’s biological signature and may inform targeted treatment at a given moment in time. Finally, insights of mechanistic signatures through integration of biological data from other progressive pulmonary pathologies could offer opportunities for drug repurposing in different phases of ARDS, for instance, from interstitial pulmonary fibrosis to ARDS fibrosis [70]

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