Personalized medicine in children with asthma.

Personalized medicine for children with asthma aims to provide a tailored management of asthma, which leads to faster and better asthma control, has less adverse events and may be cost saving. Several patient characteristics, lung function parameters and biomarkers have been shown useful in predicting treatment response or predicting successful reduction of asthma medication. As treatment response to the main asthma therapies is partly genetically determined, pharmacogenetics may open the way for personalized medicine in children with asthma. However, the number of genes identified for the various asthma drug response phenotypes remains small and randomized controlled trials are lacking. Biomarkers in exhaled breath or breath condensate remain promising but did not find their way from bench to bedside yet, except for the fraction of exhaled nitric oxide. E-health will most likely find its way to clinical practice and most interventions are at least non-inferior to usual care. More studies are needed on which interventions will benefit most individual children.