Treatable traits: toward precision medicine of chronic airway diseases

TLDR

Asthma and COPD are common chronic airway diseases with significant personal and social impact, likely forming a continuum that shares biological mechanisms and phenotypes requiring individualized treatment. The authors propose a precision medicine strategy for chronic airway diseases, particularly asthma and COPD, that targets treatments to individual patients based on genetic, biomarker, phenotypic, or psychosocial characteristics.

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.