Novel insights into the biological pathways involved in severe asthma.

Abstract

future studies. First, this study mainly focused on European-descent asthma patients, with an underrepresentation of other populations with a high asthma burden. Second, many of the signals identified may reflect corticosteroids ’ effect on gene expression instead of the disease severity. However, we acknowledge that this limitation is inherent to this pheno-type because severe asthma patients are treated by definition with high doses of corticosteroids. Future studies may con-sider focusing on single-cell sequencing to disentangle the role of specific cell types in the pathology of the disease. Moreover, RNA-seq approaches yield higher coverage of gene expression patterns than microarrays and allow the analysis of different isoforms, improving the discovery of novel potential pathways and biomarkers of severe asthma. 10 Additionally, considering that this study did not find differ-ences in the transcriptomic patterns between severe and mild-to-moderate asthma, multi-omics and system biology approaches might identify the mechanisms leading to severe asthma. Finally, future studies should examine the transcriptomic changes of severe asthma patients in paediatric populations. In summary, S (cid:1) anchez-Ovando et al. performed a transcriptomic study of severe asthma in two independent populations providing new insights into the potential role of SUMOylation, NRF2-mediated oxidative stress response and IL18R1 in the pathophysiology of severe asthma. These pathways could serve as potential therapeutic targets in the precision medicine of asthma.