Brandsma, Joost http://orcid.org/0000-0003-2914-3403
,
Goss, Victoria M.
Yang, Xian
Bakke, Per S.
Caruso, Massimo
Chanez, Pascal
Dahlén, Sven-Erik
Fowler, Stephen J.
Horvath, Ildiko
Krug, Norbert
Montuschi, Paolo
Sanak, Marek
Sandström, Thomas
Shaw, Dominick E.
Chung, Kian Fan
Singer, Florian
Fleming, Louise J.
Sousa, Ana R.
Pandis, Ioannis
Bansal, Aruna T.
Sterk, Peter J.
Djukanović, Ratko
Postle, Anthony D.
Funding for this research was provided by:
FP7 Innovative Medicines Initiative (115010)
Wellcome Trust (093500/Z/10/Z)
Article History
Received: 8 February 2018
Accepted: 12 August 2018
First Online: 17 September 2018
Compliance with ethical standards
:
: The following authors declare a conflict of interest: PJS was the recipient of the U-BIOPRED grant from the Innovative Medicines Initiative (IMI), which was jointly funded by the European Union (EU) and the European Federation of Pharmaceutical Industries and Associations (EFPIA). PC has provided consultancy services, served on advisory boards and/or received lecture fees from Boehringer Ingelheim, GSK, Centocor, ALK, AstraZeneca, Novartis, TEVA, Chiesi, Sanofi, Boston Scientific and SNCF. RD has provided consultancy services for AstraZeneca, TEVA and Novartis and has given talks at symposia organised by TEVA and Novartis. He is a co-founder of the University of Southampton spinout company Synairgen, where he is a consultant and has shares. The remaining authors report no disclosures or potential conflicts of interest.
: The U-BIOPRED study (Unbiased Biomarkers for the Prediction of Respiratory Disease Outcomes) is a pan-European multi-centre public-private collaboration involving human asthma patients and healthy volunteers. The clinical study itself was performed in 14 clinical centres across Europe and has been described previously (Shaw et al. CitationRef removed ). Its protocols were approved by all the local Ethics Review Boards, and study participants gave their written informed consent for in-depth characterisation using routine clinical protocols, haematological and biochemistry blood tests, as well as molecular characterisation by a variety of ‘omics platforms. Processed biological samples from all clinical sites were stored in a central biobank (CIGMR Biobank, University of Manchester) where their identifiers were blinded. Samples for ‘omics analysis were shipped to the analytical sites from the central biobank, and the identity of the samples was only un-blinded after all the ‘omics analyses and data processing and quality control (QC) steps had been completed.