The Genetics of Asthma Severity & Phenotypes initiative was set up in 2013 as part of an Asthma UK funded programme of work to directly address the need for a large cohort of moderate-severe asthma patients for genetic studies.

The cohort was established by bringing together all of the major respiratory centres across the UK to provide access to existing samples/clinical data but also to prospectively recruit patients (still ongoing). This cohort has been utilised in our recent GWAS of Moderate-Severe asthma (PMID: 30552067).

The cohort is currently ~4,000 individuals and to date 2,536 individuals have Affymetrix Axion array data that has completed QC imputed to provide 33M variants. The cohort has extensive clinical and immunological data although absolute numbers of these measures are variable due to the nature of the formation of the cohort.