The second symposium will bring together once again multidisciplinary critical care specialists (e.g., intensivists from internal medicine, surgery, pediatrics, and anesthesiology), microbiologists, molecular biologists, experts in high-throughput technologies, and computational scientists to discuss the application of functional genomic approaches to critical illness and injury. This time it will focus on knowledge emerging from functional genomic databases relevant to critical care medicine and provide a forum for the presentation of primary data from patients and models of critical illness. The section on proteomics will reflect new developments in this field, especially in novel protein signatures and biomarkers of pathologic states. Pharmacogenomics as it applies to critically ill and injured patients is another major area included in this year’s event. In addition to featured speakers, invited presentations and poster sessions will allow one-on-one discussions between presenters and participants.

The second symposium will also address policy issues raised by the special demands of functional genomics on resources and experimental design. Investigators who plan to use genomic approaches to study critical illness and injury face major challenges from private laboratories, academic departments, and public funding agencies. The symposium will address these uncertainties and disseminate consensus opinions through a published summary of the meeting.