The acute respiratory distress syndrome (ARDS) is a highly lethal syndrome characterized by hypoxemia and bilateral lung infiltrates in response to an inciting event such as sepsis. Allogeneic bone marrow transplantation (BMT) is a life-saving treatment for patients with hematologic malignancies that can be complicated by ARDS. We sought to identify blood gene expression signatures that distinguish whether ARDS in BMT may be a distinct pathobiologic entity from ARDS in non-BMT patients.RNA-Seq was used to measure whole blood transcript expression differences between 26 patients meeting the Berlin definition of ARDS: 8 patients without BMT and 5 BMT patients with ARDS from the Brigham and Women’s Registry of Critical Illness (RoCI), as well as 7 non-BMT patients with sepsis and 6 BMT patients with sepsis. RNA was globin cleared using the Ambion GLOBINclear kit prior to preparation of poly(A)-selected RNA-Seq libraries with the Illumina TruSeq method. An Illumina HiSeq 2500 instrument was used to generate 75 base pair paired-end reads, which were aligned to the hg38 reference genome using STAR. Differential expression analysis was performed using DESeq2.

mRNA profiles obtained via RNA-Seq for whole blood samples from ARDS patients with and without BMT

Acute respiratory distress syndrome due to sepsis (2021 ICD-10-CM code* = J80-A41)

Sepsis (2021 ICD-10-CM code* = A41)

fastq files from three donors who were sequenced in replicate were concatenated for each donorSTAR was used to align reads to the hg38 reference genomeHTSeq was used to obtain raw read counts per geneDESeq2 was used to perform differential expression analysisGenome_build: hg38

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/geo/query/acc.cgi?acc=GSE84439