%0 Journal Article %A Jeannette Bigler %A Xuguang Hu %A Michael Boedigheimer %A Anthony Rowe %A Fan Chung %A Ratko Djukanovic %A Ana Sousa %A Julie Corfield %A Ian Adcock %A Peter Sterk %A Andrew Welcher %T Whole transcriptome analysis in peripheral blood from asthmatic and healthy subjects in the U-BIOPRED study %D 2014 %J European Respiratory Journal %P P2027 %V 44 %N Suppl 58 %X Understanding asthma heterogeneity at the molecular level may help develop targeted therapies and select patients most likely to respond. Viable molecular biomarkers must stratify asthmatics with greater utility than clinical measures alone and be easily measurable.In the U-BIOPRED adult cohort, a large observational asthma study of 98 mild-moderate and 403 severe asthmatics and 100 healthy subjects, we aim to identify transcriptional differences in whole blood between clinically defined asthma groups and to determine whether unbiased clustering of the entire data set reveals disease subgroups. Altered transcripts may define dysregulated biological pathways. The overall analysis was well-powered to detect modest changes in gene expression.Severe and mild-moderate asthmatics shared transcriptional differences compared with healthy subjects. The differences between healthy and mild-moderate asthmatics were smaller but still significant. Differences between asthmatic and healthy subjects were enriched in genes highly expressed in eosinophils (increased) and B-cells (decreased). The steroid-response gene FKBP5 was increased in some severe asthmatics. Fingerprints from unbiased analyses and analysis of genes known to be altered in asthmatic airways will be presented.These analyses suggest the feasibility of identifying stratification markers in asthmatics using blood RNA. This data will also be compared with clinical data, transcripts identified in airways, and other analytes measured in this data set.View this table:No. differentially expressed genes %U