BOBCAT Bronchial biopsy study

Clinical subphenotypes of asthma are characterized by pathological, cellular, and molecular heterogeneity of the airway. Gene expression profiling of affected tissues in diseased patients by microarray analysis will provide insight into the molecular heterogeneity and support the development of hypotheses of pathological mechanisms. Bronchial biopsies were taken during bronchcoscopy from severe, uncontrolled asthma patients from the Bronchoscopic Exploratory Research Study of Biomarkers in Corticosteroid-refractory Asthma (BOBCAT) (Jia et al., 2012). RNA (Qiagen AllPrep with on-column DNase treatment) was isolated from these biopsies for gene expression microarray analysis.