POSTN and asthma: Such analysis is limited to a single study of mild, steroid-naive asthmatics by Woodruff and colleagues [9] who assessed gene transcription in the airways of 42 nonsmoking subjects with asthma, 28 nonsmoking healthy controls, and 16 current smokers without asthma but with mild to moderate airflow obstruction (disease controls) and observed two broad clusters defined by the expression of three genes (POSTN, CLCA1 and SERPINB2) induced by the type-2 (T2) cytokine interleukin (IL)-13.