A single blood test can now predict the future of a patient's illness by watching a movie of how their RNA is changing.
Traditional blood tests give a static snapshot of a patient's health at a single moment in time. This new method, called VeloCD, looks at the ratio of spliced to unspliced mRNA to determine RNA velocity. This allows doctors to see not just where a patient's health is now, but where it is headed in the next several hours. It can accurately predict if an acutely ill person will get better or require intensive care before they actually show signs of crashing. This predictive power could allow hospitals to intervene much earlier and save lives that might otherwise be lost to sudden complications.
Predicting trajectories of acute illness using RNA velocity of whole blood
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Abstract Transcriptomic analyses reveal the status of cells, tissues, or organisms, across states of health and disease. RNA velocity adds a temporal dimension to single cell analyses, predicting future transcriptomic and phenotypic states, based on current spliced and unspliced mRNA of each cell. We hypothesized that RNA velocity could be adapted to predict future clinical status of individuals with acute illness using their whole-blood transcriptome. We developed a method for quantitative pred