The severe heterogeneous asthma research collaboration, patient-centred (SHARP) ERS clinical research collaboration: A new dawn in asthma research

Abstract

The past 30 years have seen major advances in the understanding of asthma mechanisms and the clinical introduction of effective medicines based on these pathways. The first major step-change occurred in the 1980s with the development of bronchial challenge as a research tool to dissect the airways inflammatory responses [1, 2]. The advent of bronchoscopy and sputum induction in the early 1990s, to study asthma pathology in vivo, enabled the description of characteristic features of airways inflammation and remodelling [3–6], while epidemiological and challenge studies showed viruses to be the main cause of asthma exacerbations [7, 8]. One of the greatest discoveries was the central role of T..