Whole blood RNA sequencing in idiopathic pneumonia syndrome reveals a unique transcriptomic profile compared to ARDS

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

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Englert JA, Cho MH, Lamb AE, Shumyatcher M, Barragan-Bradford D, Basil MC, Higuera A, Isabelle C, Vera MP, Dieffenbach PB, Fredenburgh LE, Kang JB, Bhatt AS, Antin JH, Ho VT, Soiffer RJ, Howrylak JA, Himes BE, Baron RM