Abstract

Asthma and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) are two prevalent chronic airway diseases that have a high personal and social impact. They likely represent a continuum of different diseases that may share biological mechanisms ( i.e. endotypes), and present similar clinical, functional, imaging and/or biological features that can be observed ( i.e. phenotypes) which require individualised treatment. Precision medicine is defined as “treatments targeted to the needs of individual patients on the basis of genetic, biomarker, phenotypic, or psychosocial characteristics that distinguish a given patient from other patients with similar clinical presentations”. In this Perspective, we propose a precision medicine strategy for chronic airway diseases in general, and asthma and COPD in particular.