Airway Smooth Muscle-Specific Transcriptomic Signatures of Glucocorticoid Exposure.

Glucocorticoids, commonly used asthma controller medications, decrease symptoms in most patients, but some remain symptomatic despite high dose treatment. The physiological basis underlying glucocorticoid response, especially among asthma patients with severe, refractory disease is not fully understood. We sought to identify differences between fatal asthma and non-asthma donor-derived airway smooth muscle (ASM) cell transcriptomic response to glucocorticoid exposure, and to compare ASM-specific changes to those of other cell types. In cells derived from 9 fatal asthma and 8 non-asthma donors, RNA-Seq was used to measure ASM transcriptome changes after exposure to budesonide (100nM 24hr) or control vehicle (DMSO). Differential expression results were obtained for this dataset, as well as 13 publicly available glucocorticoid response transcriptomic datasets corresponding to 7 cell types. Specific genes were differentially expressed in response to glucocorticoid exposure: 7,835 and 6,957 in non-asthma and f...