Understanding And Diagnosing Asthma And Copd By Metabolomics

Metabolomics is an emerging analytical technology which offers unique molecular insights into respiratory diseases such as asthma, COPD, lung cancer, tuberculosis and influenza. Increasing number of studies have demonstrated that metabolomics is valuable in identifying disease phenotypes by revealing disease-relevant metabolic biomarkers in various lung diseases, especially asthma. These unique and distinctive disease metabolic signatures can be useful for clinical discrimination of various airway diseases. Latest reports have demonstrated that metabolomics may also be useful in diagnosing and separating different disease outcomes and stages, implicating the diagnostic value of this analytical approach. In this chapter, we provide a comprehensive overview of metabolomics investigations in asthma and COPD. This review will also discuss the prospective applications, advances and challenges in applying metabolomics to biomarker discovery, and the understanding of molecular disease mechanisms of these major respiratory diseases. With emerging technological advances in metabolomics-related analytical platforms, it is anticipated that metabolomics will become a major analytical technology for clinical phenotyping, diagnosis and understanding of asthma and COPD.