[From a genomic point of view asthma is a multifactorial disease. It means that the susceptibility to the disease results from interaction of several (possibly several hundred) genes; in addition, the development of the disease requires environmental factors, as well. In the last years the hypothesis-free methods became widespread in the field of genomics investigating the genomic background of diseases. These methods do not need previous knowledge about the pathomechanism of the diseases and make it possible to discover new metabolic pathways. In this review all of the new asthma genes will be presented detected in the last few years by two such methods, by positional cloning and genome wide association study. The careful design of the studies, the large populations, the robust genomic and bioinformatic methods make it likely that these genes are really asthma genes playing important roles in the pathomechanism of the disease and are potential new therapeutic targets.]