The course of COPD is frequently complicated by periods of exacerbation (worsening symptoms) related to infections, pollution, other diseases or poor management of disease. These periods result in urgent visits to physician offices or emergency rooms accounting for the leading cause of hospitalizations. In terms of patient care, physicians lack objective measurements to accurately risk-stratify patients and monitor the effectiveness of interventions provided for their patients. Regrettably, there are no blood tests that can predict who will and will not get AECOPD to require hospitalization. Additionally, current therapies for COPD are only modestly effective in reducing exacerbations. A major challenge in COPD drug development and patient care is the lack of markers, surrogate or otherwise, that can be used to predict outcomes such as hospitalization or mortality.
These critical barriers to drug development and improved patient care could be addressed by the development and clinical implementation of diagnostic and predictive AECOPD biomarkers. This is the aim of an already existing and related study titled "Clinical Implementation and Outcomes Evaluation of Blood-Based Biomarkers for COPD Management study". This study has been enrolling COPD patients since July 2012. The majority of the the study patients were on prednisone at the time of blood collection and at enrollment.
The analyses of publicly available datasets make it abundantly clear that prednisone has important and wide-ranging effects on peripheral whole blood gene expression. These data are insufficient, however, because they cannot inform disease specific effects on gene expression. In addition, because these studies were carried out using a different gene expression platform, they cannot be used to estimate the probeset-specific prednisone effects.
Therefore, the investigators need to ensure that the gene expression associated with AECOPD is not in fact a result of the drug effect. Conducting this study will help us answer this question.
