Output details

Acute exacerbations of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease: identification of biologic clusters and their biomarkers.

The author made a substantial contribution to the conception and design of the study and to the organisation of the conduct of the study and to carrying out the study (including acquisition of study data) and to analysis and interpretation of study data.

Bafadhel was the Principal Investigator in this study and was responsible for study design, volunteer recruitment, sample collection, study analysis and writing of the manuscript. Barer took the central role in developing, organising and interpreting the bacteriological analyses. Five, previously unpublished quantitative PCRs were developed and validated for the study and were applied to over 1000 samples under his immediate supervision. He was directly involved in all the discussions leading to the paper and in both drafting and editing the paper.

182 exacerbation events were captured in 86 patients by prospectively monitoring and sampling sputum and blood from 145 patients at 3 monthly intervals when stable. Exacerbations were sampled at onset, 2, and 6 weeks. Microbial and host cell content was determined on sputum and biomarkers analysed in sputum and blood yielding approximately 20,000 data points for the final manuscript. Barer directly supervised all bacteriological analyses (DNA extraction and archiving together with development and validation of 5 new qPCRs). 728 samples directly contributed to this output but required prospective sampling meant that over 1000 were subjected to culture and molecular analyses.