Active Lungs & Breathing Cancer

UK-Korea Consortium: Establishing Precision Medicine in severe asthma

Funder UKRI
Recipient organisation Imperial College London
Funding £800K
Period Mar 2025 — Mar 2027

In plain English

AI plain-English summary

A blood test or a breath sample could soon tell doctors which severe asthma patients will benefit from antibody treatments—and which need a different approach entirely. Severe asthma affects people whose symptoms do not respond to standard inhalers. Current antibody treatments, such as those targeting IL-5 or IL-4 receptors, work well for some patients but not others. Doctors have no reliable way to predict who will respond, so many patients try treatments that do not help them, while others miss out on therapies that could work. This project aims to solve that by classifying patients based on the molecular signatures of their disease—using genes and proteins measured in blood or exhaled breath—to match each person to the treatment most likely to control their asthma. If successful, this approach could transform severe asthma from a trial-and-error condition into one where treatment is chosen with precision from the start. Patients would gain better symptom control and avoid ineffective drugs. The researchers also note that this is the first time such molecular classification has been attempted in asthma or any chronic disease. If it works, the same precision-medicine framework could be extended to other respiratory and non-respiratory conditions, potentially improving care for a much wider group of patients.

View original technical description
We propose to do this molecular classification in 400 severe asthma patients who will be observed over a one-year period in several centres specialising in treating patients with severe asthma in both UK and Korea. We wish to see what type of asthma and what diagnostic biomarker measured in the blood or in the exhaled breath that can tell us with great accuracy who will respond well to treatment with the antibody treatments that we have at the moment such as the anti-IL5 or anti- IL5Ra or anti-IL4Ra. For those who cannot have this treatment, we will use the genes and proteins to tell us which type of treatments that might improve their asthma. Therefore, this approach of Precision Medicine will bring newer more effective treatments to subgroups of severe asthma. We foresee that this research will tell us exactly who needs treatment with these antibody treatments, and this will allow patients to take better control of their asthma. This is a pioneering piece of research because this is the first time that this approach has been taken in the treatment of asthma or any other chronic disease. If we are successful in our objectives, this might pave the way for the establishment of Precision Medicine not only in severe asthma but also in other respiratory and non-respiratory condition, that will provide benefits to a large range of patients suffering from diseases such as severe asthma.

View the original record at the funder ↗

Researchers

Kian Fan Chung (Principal Investigator)

Related Research

Grants with similar aims, by meaning.

MICA: Korea-UK PRISM consortium: Establishing Precision Medicine in severe asthma
PRISM: Molecular phenotyping of participants with severe asthma to determine response to biologic therapies and stability
Molecular phenotyping of participants with severe asthma to determine response to biologic therapies and stability
United Kingdom Refractory Asthma Stratification Programme (RASP-UK)
Integrating human functional genomics and transcriptomics in highly phenotyped severe asthmatics

Original classification

Intramural

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