Personalized Medicine in the ICU

Dear Colleagues,

The Journal of Personalized Medicine has launched a Special Issue on “Personalized medicine in the ICU”.

Critical Care Medicine has been dealing with the most vulnerable patient—the critically ill. Pathophysiologic mechanisms of disease and response to disease, monitoring issues and individualized treatment approaches, especially concerning the dosing, are distinct compared to regular patients and vary considerably between critical care patients. Critical Care Departments hospitalize patients with a wide diversity of diseases requiring different management approaches (neurosurgical, thoracic-surgical, general surgical, medical, COVID-19 patients).

More than ever, in the pandemic era, scientists have realized the rationale to personalize medicine, especially for critically ill patients. Clinicians have dealt with patients presenting one disease (COVID-19), but with diversity in clinical, laboratory and pathophysiological findings. This wide variance highlighted the need to identify subpopulations and tailor the treatment applied. Multiple subphenotypes have been identified concerning the presence of ARDS, sepsis, hyperinflammatory syndrome or multiorgan involvement. The pandemic clarified that although there was a huge number of patients suffering from the same disease modality, many randomized controlled trials failed to simplify the therapeutic approach. The underlying different pathophysiologic, cellular and molecular pathways called for individualization of treatments. The “one size does not fit all” approach is translated into precision medicine.

Under this perspective, we are calling for review articles and original contributions covering all aspects of how personalized medicine can improve critically ill patients’ management in the ICU.

Prof. Dr. Epaminondas Zakynthinos
Dr. Vasiliki Tsolaki
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 250 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for assessment.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-anonymized peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Journal of Personalized Medicine is an international peer-reviewed open access monthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2600 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.