Asthma metabolomics and the potential for integrative omics in research and the clinic.

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Asthma is a complex disease well suited to metabolomic profiling, both for the development of novel biomarkers and for the improved understanding of pathophysiology. In this review, we summarize the 21 existing metabolomic studies of asthma in humans, all of which reported significant findings and concluded that individual metabolites and metabolomic profiles measured in exhaled breath condensate, urine, plasma and serum could identify asthmatics and asthma phenotypes with high discriminatory ability. There was considerable consistency across the studies in terms of the reported biomarkers, regardless of biospecimen, profiling technology and population age. In particular, acetate, adenosine, alanine, hippurate, succinate, threonine and trans-aconitate, and pathways relating to hypoxia response, oxidative stress, immunity, inflammation, lipid metabolism and the TCA cycle were all identified as significant in at least two studies. There were also a number of non-replicated results; however, the literature is not yet sufficiently developed to determine whether these represent spurious findings or reflect the substantial heterogeneity and limited statistical power in the studies and their methods to date. This review highlights the need for additional asthma metabolomic studies to explore these issues, and further, the need for standardized methods in the way these studies are conducted. We conclude by discussing the potential of translation of these metabolomic findings into clinically useful biomarkers and the crucial role that integrated-omics is likely to play in this endeavor.

Abbreviation
Chest
Publication Date
2017-02-01
Pubmed ID
27776981
Medium
Print-Electronic
Full Title
Asthma metabolomics and the potential for integrative omics in research and the clinic.
Authors
Kelly RS, Dahlin A, McGeachie MJ, Qiu W, Sordillo J, Wan ES, Wu AC, Lasky-Su J