Abstract
Asthma and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) are two prevalent chronic airway diseases that have a high personal and social impact. They likely represent a continuum of different diseases that may share biological mechanisms (i.e. endotypes), and present similar clinical, functional, imaging and/or biological features that can be observed (i.e. phenotypes) which require individualised treatment. Precision medicine is defined as “treatments targeted to the needs of individual patients on the basis of genetic, biomarker, phenotypic, or psychosocial characteristics that distinguish a given patient from other patients with similar clinical presentations”. In this Perspective, we propose a precision medicine strategy for chronic airway diseases in general, and asthma and COPD in particular.
Abstract
A discussion of the concept of “treatable traits” as a way towards precision medicine of chronic airway diseases http://ow.ly/UbJAm
Footnotes
For editorial comment see Eur Respir J 2016; 47: 359–361 [DOI: 10.1183/13993003.01930-2015].
Support statement: A. Agusti is supported by Instituto de Salud Carlos III (PI12/01117), Recercaixa-2012 (AA084096), SEPAR (PI065/2013, PI192/2012) and FUCAP 2012; M. Thomas is supported by the NIHR Southampton Biomedical Research Unit, NIHR Wessex CLAHRC; M. Humbert is supported by Université Paris-Sud, INSERM and AP-HP (DHU Thorax Innovation); R. Beasley is supported by HRC NZ IRO grant.
Conflict of interest: Disclosures can be found alongside the online version of this article at erj.ersjournals.com
- Received August 15, 2015.
- Accepted October 27, 2015.
- Copyright ©ERS 2016