Asthma, the ugly duckling of lung disease proteomics?

The human respiratory system represents a vital but vulnerable system. It is a major target for many diseases such as cancer and asthma. The incidence of these diseases has increased dramatically in the last 40-50 years. In the search for possible new therapies, many experimental tools and methods have been developed to study these diseases, ranging from animal models to in vitro studies. In the last decades, genomic and proteomic approaches have gained a lot of attention. After the major scientific breakthroughs in the field of genomics, it is now widely accepted that to understand biological processes, large-scale protein studies through proteomics techniques are required. In the battle against lung cancer, the proteomics approach has already been successfully implemented. Surprisingly, only a few proteomics studies on the ever-increasing global asthma problem have been published so far. And although proteomics also has its limitations and experimental difficulties, in our opinion, proteomics can definitely contribute to the understanding of a complex disease such as asthma. Therefore, the additional values and possibilities of proteomics in asthma research should be thoroughly investigated. A close collaboration between the different scientific disciplines may eventually lead to the development of new therapeutic strategies against asthma. © 2004 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.