“The study by Govoni and colleagues (Govoni M, Bassi M, Santoro D, Donegan S, Singh D. Serum interleukin-8 as a determinant of response to PDE4 inhibition in chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. Am J Respir Crit Care Med 2023; 208:559–569.)
opens a new field of investigation into using IL-8 serum concentrations as a biomarker to predict the effectiveness of PDE inhibitors (and maybe other drugs). This hypothesis remains to be tested, but it could prove promising. Furthermore, the sequential strategy used to identify predictive biomarkers for a specific molecular target (here, PDE4) is quite interesting. The authors start with gene expression signature analysis of the molecular target, then explore associations between target signaling and selected biomarkers, and end with evaluating the degree of association between the most promising biomarker (here, IL-8) and treatment response. This strategy is likely to yield more robust results than a “blind” search for biomarkers and could pave the way for future attempts at identifying predictors of treatment effectiveness for therapies that have very specific mechanisms of action but that were tested without initial biomarker-guided indications.”
Source: Am J Crit Care Med, 2023