Helena Pite, Mário Morais-Almeida, Tjeert Mensinga and Zuzana Diamant

Additional information is available at the end of the chapter

http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/62790

#### **Abstract**

The asthma concept has evolved throughout the years: one major step in asthma management is the recognition of the chronic (airway) inflammation; another major step is further understanding of asthma heterogeneity and subsequent development of targeted therapies. While the concept of chronic inflammation, airway structural changes and their variability over time are widely accepted, their measurement and monitoring have gone through many hardships.

In this chapter, we discuss the need for applicable biomarkers in asthma management and focus on the currently available and most promising totally non-invasive sam‐ plings and detection techniques, ranging from single biomarkers to biomarker panels and composite signatures, including molecular high-throughput "omics" technologies outcomes. Limitations of these biomarkers are compared with minimal-, semi- and invasive techniques. Additionally, we discuss the benefits of an integrative systems medicine approach, considering asthma phenotypes based on cluster analysis of multidimensional biomarker datasets and its contribution to recent developments towards the promise of better understanding asthma and personalised asthma manage‐ ment.

**Keywords:** asthma, biomarkers, composite signature, phenotype, personalised medi‐ cine
