Challenges, impact and the future

We are at the very beginning of understanding the respiratory microbiome and its influence on health and disease; early indications are that this might be profound. Though it builds on decades of research in other fields, including environmental microbiology, clinical microbiology, gut and oral microbiome work, currently we are describing the organisms that are present in different parts of the respiratory tract under different conditions. Few studies have done so longitudinally and the relationship with disease is largely associative, making translation to clinical applications challenging. We are beginning to understand the nature of the challenges and we can draw common problems from the chapters of this Monograph.