New publication: Therapeutic targeting of the Respiratory Microbiome

Robert Dickson and an all-star team of lung microbiome investigators have published a Perspective in the American Journal of Respiratory and Critical Care Medicine on “Therapeutic Targeting of the Respiratory Microbiome.”

“Across the spectrum of acute and chronic respiratory disease, respiratory microbiota are detectable, viable, and variable across patients (2–5); correlated with disease status and severity (1); associated with airway and alveolar inflammation (5, 6); metabolically active and immunologically consequential (7, 8); predictive of clinical outcomes (9–11); influenced by environment and geography (6, 12); and causally involved in disease pathogenesis in animal models (11, 13).

Given these insights, we believe it is prudent to consider the respiratory microbiome as an unexploited, understudied therapeutic target: a biologically potent element of respiratory homeostasis, variable across patients, that may be more readily modifiable than other sources of patient heterogeneity, such as host genomes or comorbidities. In this Perspective, we delineate the anticipated opportunities and challenges related to clinically modulating the respiratory microbiome, which refers to the communities of microbes within the human respiratory tract and their associated ecological milieu.”

Manuscript (American Journal of Respiratory & Critical Care Medicine)