Biomolecular Sciences Seminar Series: Dr. Mary Cloud Ammons Anderson

Biomolecular Sciences Seminar Series

Dr. Mary Cloud Ammons Anderson, Boise VA

Title: Predicting the Unpredictable: A Multiomics Approach to Diabetic Foot Ulcer Healing

Abstract: The chronic wound microenvironment consists of a complex milieu of host cells,microbial species, and metabolites. While much is known about wound microbiomes, the fieldhas limited knowledge about how the dynamic interaction between the wound metaboliclandscape and microbiome influences wound healing clinical outcomes. Furthermore, integrating complex datasets into predictive models of wound healing is almost non-existent. Weprofiled 13 patients treated in the Wound Care Clinic at the Boise VA Medical Center, resultingin a total of 45 foot ulcer debridement tissue samples, of which 20 samples came from patients with wounds that healed and 25 from patients with wounds that did not heal with standard of care. Microbial rRNA and total metabolites were extracted from each sample followed by 16S rRNA sequencing, global metabolomics, and extraction of clinical metadata from patient records. Healing outcome was modeled as a function of the clinical, microbiome, and metabolome datasets using DIABLO (Data Integration Analysis for Biomarker Discovery using Latent Components). The final model selected 208 stable features (N = 17 clinical, 94 microbiome, and 97 metabolome) and clinical outcome was correctly predicted with an accuracy of approximately 85%. These results indicate that integrating multi-omics data with clinical metadata can predict clinical outcome of wound healing with low error rates. Furthermore, the biomarkers selected offer novel insights into the composition of the wound microenvironment, which may reveal innovative therapeutic approaches and improve treatment efficacy in difficult-to-heal wounds.