Metabolomics in Animal Models of Bronchial Asthma and Its Translational Importance for Clinics

Abstract

Bronchial asthma is an extremely heterogenous chronic respiratory disorder with several distinct endotypes and phenotypes. These subtypes differ not only in the pathophysiological changes and/or clinical features but also in their response to the treatment. Therefore, precise diagnostics represent a fundamental condition for effective therapy. In the diagnostic process, metabolomic approaches have been increasingly used, providing detailed information on the metabolic alterations associated with human asthma. Further information is brought by metabolomic analysis of samples obtained from animal models. This article summarizes the current knowledge on metabolomic changes in human and animal studies of asthma and reveals that alterations in lipid metabolism, amino acid metabolism, purine metabolism, glycolysis and the tricarboxylic acid cycle found in the animal studies resemble, to a large extent, the changes found in human patients with asthma. The findings indicate that, despite the limitations of animal modeling in asthma, pre-clinical testing and metabolomic analysis of animal samples may, together with metabolomic analysis of human samples, contribute to a novel way of personalized treatment of asthma patients.

Keywords: animal model; bronchial asthma; metabolomics.

Figure 1

Scheme of alterations of major metabolic pathways demonstrated in human and animal studies. More detailed information is provided in the text and in Table 1 and Table 2. Alterations in lipid metabolism have been demonstrated in both human [29,39,41,43,44,45,51,52,54,55] and animal [75,79,80,81,82,83,85,86,87,93] studies. Alterations in amino acid metabolism have been shown in both human [41,54,58,59,60,61,62,64,65,66,69,72] and animal [79,80,81,82,83,85,87,92,93,94] studies. Alterations in purine metabolism have been confirmed in both human [71,72,73] and animal [79,80,83,92] studies. Alterations in glycolysis and TCA cycle have been demonstrated in both human [55,59,65,67,74,75,76,77] and animal [78,81,87,92,93,94] studies.