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Updated: Dec 30, 2025
Breath Collection from Children for Disease Biomarker Discovery
Published on: February 14, 2019
Childhood asthma in the new omics era: challenges and perspectives
Korneliusz Golebski1, Michael Kabesch2, Erik Melén3
1Department of Respiratory Medicine, Amsterdam University Medical Centers, University of Amsterdam, Amsterdam, The Netherlands.
Insights
Advanced omics technologies offer insights into childhood asthma heterogeneity. Integrating multiomics and clinical data may personalize severe asthma treatment and improve patient quality-of-life.
Area of Science:
- Pediatric Allergy and Immunology
- Genomics and Bioinformatics
- Precision Medicine
Background:
- Childhood asthma is a complex inflammatory disease with diverse phenotypes and endotypes.
- Severe asthma significantly impacts patients' and caregivers' quality of life.
- Omics technologies offer a powerful lens to investigate asthma's underlying biological mechanisms.
Purpose of the Study:
- To review how novel omics approaches have advanced the understanding of childhood asthma.
- To highlight recent findings from genomics, epigenomics, transcriptomics, and metabolomics in childhood asthma.
- To discuss the clinical implications of these findings for guiding treatment in severe asthma.
Main Methods:
- Review of recent (pharmaco)genomics, epigenomics, transcriptomics, and metabolomics studies.
- Analysis of how omics data contributes to understanding asthma heterogeneity.
- Exploration of potential clinical biomarkers for treatment prediction.
Main Results:
- Omics studies have expanded the understanding of asthma heterogeneity and cellular processes.
- Biomarkers for predicting treatment response and disease progression are being identified.
- Novel insights into endotypes may guide precision medicine approaches.
Conclusions:
- Omics technologies are crucial for unraveling childhood asthma complexity.
- There is a clinical need for individual-level biomarkers, especially for biologics.
- Integrating multiomics and clinical data is a promising strategy for personalized risk prediction and treatment guidance.
Purpose Of Review:
Childhood asthma is a heterogeneous inflammatory disease comprising different phenotypes and endotypes and, particularly in its severe forms, has a large impact on the quality-of-life of patients and caregivers. The application of advanced omics technologies provides useful insights into underlying asthma endotypes and may provide potential clinical biomarkers to guide treatment and move towards a precision medicine approach.
Recent Findings:
The current article addresses how novel omics approaches have shaped our current understanding of childhood asthma and highlights recent findings from (pharmaco)genomics, epigenomics, transcriptomics, and metabolomics studies on childhood asthma and their potential clinical implications to guide treatment in severe asthmatics.
Summary:
Until now, omics studies have largely expanded our view on asthma heterogeneity, helped understand cellular processes underlying asthma, and brought us closer towards identifying (bio)markers that will allow the prediction of treatment responsiveness and disease progression. There is a clinical need for biomarkers that will guide treatment at the individual level, particularly in the field of biologicals. The integration of multiomics data together with clinical data could be the next promising step towards development individual risk prediction models to guide treatment. However, this requires large-scale collaboration in a multidisciplinary setting.
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