Introduce
The concept of sepsis can be traced back to ancient Greece when Hippocrates described it as a dangerous, odorous, and biological body decay [1]. From the establishment of the first sepsis-1 consensus definition in 1991 to the revised sepsis-3 consensus definition in 2016[2], we have a better understanding of the definition, identification, and management of sepsis. Early sepsis identification is the key factor to improve the prognosis of sepsis. Therefore, the sepsis treatment guidelines were revised again in 2021. The guidelines recommend the use of sequential organ failure assessment (qSOFA), national early warning results (News), and modified early warning results (Mews) scoring tools to identify and screen early sepsis[3]. The pathophysiological mechanism of sepsis has a new understanding and change. The systemic inflammatory response caused by infection is no longer simply attributed to sepsis. The occurrence of organ dysfunction will be one of the important factors belonging to sepsis. The incidence and mortality of sepsis in the world are still at a high level. A study counted the incidence and mortality of sepsis in the world from 1979 to 2015 through database retrieval. The report showed that there were about 50 million patients with sepsis in the world, of which about 5 million died of sepsis every year. However, these data were from high-income countries or regions, which could not fully reflect the true incidence and mortality of sepsis in the world but were higher than the current statistics, This is related to data loss and lack in low-income countries or regions[4]. In addition, the major disease-causing death in the pediatric intensive care unit (PICU) is still severe sepsis, with a mortality rate of about 10% -48%[5].
At present, the treatment of sepsis is still based on symptomatic treatment, including empirical antibiotic anti-infection, regulation of coagulation dysfunction, protection of dysfunction of important organs, fluid infusion, and vasopressor drugs to stabilize hemodynamics, but it can not achieve precise treatment [6,7,8]. Sepsis itself is a complex internal molecular mechanism, which has drawn an interconnected and huge disease network (multiple genes, multiple protein functions, and multiple signaling pathways). Just like the complex balance of the human body itself, it is difficult to break the human body’s ecological balance only by changing one or several goals. Therefore, we can treat such complex diseases as sepsis, cancer, and cardiovascular diseases through different ways of multi-target diseases.
Network pharmacology shows the complex network relationship of disease target drug function pathway through a biological network, gradually promoting the transformation of the development mode of a single target drug to the overall development mode of the drug[9]. The emergence of network pharmacology is to help us better understand the multiple mechanisms of action of drugs. The use of multi-omics (genomics, transcriptomics, proteomics) theory, combined with powerful database retrieval and computer modeling technology will help us to develop drugs for the treatment of complex diseases and better understand the complex biological mechanisms of diseases, To truly cure such complex diseases as sepsis from the molecular tissue organ organism level [10,11].