Practising Personalized Medicine in Asthma

Abstract

Asthma is a common and, in many cases, serious condition. After rapid improvement in outcomes following the introduction of the first guidelines in 1990, progress in this area has stalled. Current treatments follow a "one size fits all" approach without acknowledgement of the many different underlying disease mechanisms that drive the morbidity of asthma. Personalized medicine allows us to instead direct treatments at these specific causal mechanisms, targeting the exact pathology present in each patient. We believe that with this approach not only will we improve patient outcomes, we will also open the door to novel areas of research and drug discovery. In this article we describe where we are presently with the move towards personalized medicine in asthma, firstly explaining why we believe our current approach is insufficient, and secondly outlining in practical terms how physicians can adopt this novel approach when treating patients with asthma in clinics today. (BRN Rev. 2016;2:229-38) Corresponding author: Ian Pavord, Ian.pavord@ndm.ox.ac.uk