Precision medicine for the best treatment of chronic obstructive airway disease

ABSTRACT

Bronchial asthma and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) are 2 representative diseases of chronic obstructive inflammatory airway diseases, and both show a wide range of heterogeneity in their clinical features. Although one end of typical asthma and the other end of COPD are clearly different, both diseases share lots of similarities in biological aspects and clinical manifestations. Currently, 2 different guidelines exist for asthma and COPD management, respectively, and in many clinical situations it is not easy to manage patients especially who have both features and show refractoriness to available medications. Since the features of the diseases are remarkably diverse in terms of clinical courses, prognosis and responses to therapeutic drugs, there have been vigorous efforts to classify appropriate subtypes in order to improve management of the diseases. However, dichotomous thinking about asthma and COPD precludes precise classification of the diseases in the real world. In this article, thus, chronic obstructive airway disease (COAD) ranging from asthma particularly in adults to COPD is proposed as 1 target subject to analyze precise classification based on exact phenotyping and endotyping of the diseases. In the current article, the reasonable precision medicine approach is also suggested based on treatable traits of COAD to achieve the best treatment for COAD patients.