Personalized Medicine for Chronic Respiratory Infectious Diseases: Tuberculosis, Nontuberculous Mycobacterial Pulmonary Diseases, and Chronic Pulmonary Aspergillosis.
Chronic respiratory infectious diseases are causing high rates of morbidity and mortality worldwide. Tuberculosis, a major cause of chronic pulmonary infection, is currently responsible for approximately 1.5 million deaths per year. Although important advances in the fight against tuberculosis have been made, the progress towards eradication of this disease is being challenged by the dramatic increase in multidrug-resistant bacilli. Nontuberculous mycobacteria causing pulmonary disease and chronic pulmonary aspergillosis are emerging infectious diseases. In contrast to other infectious diseases, chronic respiratory infections share the trait of having highly variable treatment outcomes despite longstanding antimicrobial therapy. Recent scientific progress indicates that medicine is presently at a transition stage from programmatic to personalized management. We explain current state-of-the-art management concepts of chronic pulmonary infectious diseases as well as the underlying methods for therapeutic decisions and their implications for personalized medicine. Furthermore, we describe promising biomarkers and techniques with the potential to serve future individual treatment concepts in this field of difficult-to-treat patients. These include candidate markers to improve individual risk assessment for disease development, the design of tailor-made drug therapy regimens, and individualized biomarker-guided therapy duration to achieve relapse-free cure. In addition, the use of therapeutic drug monitoring to reach optimal drug dosing with the smallest rate of adverse events as well as candidate agents for future host-directed therapies are described. Taken together, personalized medicine will provide opportunities to substantially improve the management and treatment outcome of difficult-to-treat patients with chronic respiratory infections.
Division of Clinical Infectious Diseases, Research Center Borstel, Borstel, Germany.
Helmut J F
HJ
Salzer
Nasstasja
N
Wassilew
Niklas
N
Köhler
Ioana D
ID
Olaru
Gunar
G
Günther
Christian
C
Herzmann
Barbara
B
Kalsdorf
Patricia
P
Sanchez-Carballo
Elena
E
Terhalle
Thierry
T
Rolling
Christoph
C
Lange
Jan
J
Heyckendorf
D000900:Anti-Bacterial Agents / Q000627:therapeutic use; D000935:Antifungal Agents / Q000627:therapeutic use*; D000995:Antitubercular Agents / Q000627:therapeutic use*; D002908:Chronic Disease; D016903:Drug Monitoring; D024881:Drug Resistance, Bacterial; D025141:Drug Resistance, Fungal; D006801:Humans; D009165:Mycobacterium Infections, Nontuberculous / Q000175:diagnosis / Q000188:drug therapy* / Q000382:microbiology; D009169:Mycobacterium tuberculosis; D009170:Nontuberculous Mycobacteria; D057285:Precision Medicine; D055732:Pulmonary Aspergillosis / Q000175:diagnosis / Q000188:drug therapy* / Q000382:microbiology; D014397:Tuberculosis, Pulmonary / Q000175:diagnosis / Q000188:drug therapy* / Q000382:microbiology
D000900:Anti-Bacterial Agents; D000935:Antifungal Agents; D000995:Antitubercular Agents