ABSTRACT
Physicians and students of medicine for the most part view asthma from clinical symptoms and a phenotype perspective as they treat these patients day in and day out. Asthma is a more complex disease that cannot be understood merely by analyzing its phenotypic characteristics. In this chapter we will introduce asthma as a disease that originates and evolves due to the sum total of all molecular (DNA, RNA, methylation, histone modifi cation, protein and metabolite) cellular and tissue interactions in an asthma patient’s body with the environment. We will illustrate the immense heterogeneity and evolving phenotypes of this disease and justify the need to personalize the treatment and management of asthma patients using molecular biomarkers. Lastly, we will discuss the implications for physicians, new drug development and society at large due to the paradigm shift in moving away from the reactive traditional medicine that is widely practiced today, to the more proactive personalized medicine approach that is slowly but surely gaining ground in the post-human genome sequencing era.
