UCSF

Human asthma can be subcategorized in several ways, but one powerful approach is to subtype asthma on the basis of underlying cellular and molecular mechanisms. Groups of patients with a disease that share a common underlying biology are termed an "endotype." Endotypes of asthma have been studied at both the cellular level (by cytological examination of induced sputum) and, increasingly, at the molecular level. Genome-wide analyses of mRNA expression within the lung have been useful in the identification of molecular endotypes of asthma and point to protein biomarkers of those endotypes that can be measured in the blood. More recently, studies of microRNA expression in airway epithelial cells in asthma have identified additional candidate biomarkers of asthma endotypes. One potentially valuable property of microRNAs is that they can also be measured in extracellular fluids and therefore have the potential to serve directly as noninvasively measured biomarkers.