POU5F1 and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease: In a public dataset (GSE137557) that includes patients with very severe COPD (FEV1% = 18.6 ± 5.1), there was a decrease of 22.3% in the transcript levels of POU5F1 in proliferative basal cells (2.74 ± 0.147FPKM vs. 3.52 ± 0.45FPKM, COPD vs. non-COPD, p < 0.05) and a 24.2% reduction in fully differentiated cells (3.09 ± 0.27FPKM vs. 4.08 ± 0.3FPKM, COPD vs. non-COPD, p < 0.01) (Figure 2A).