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Full NameProfessor Liam Heaney
Centre for Experimental Medicine
Queen's University Belfast
Webpage:qub.ac.uk
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- Other
Personalised medicine / early phase clinical trials
- Medicine
- Respiratory Medicine
Difficult to treat asthma affects up to 20% of patients with asthma despite currently available therapies and is associated with significant healthcare cost. Treatment guidelines advise the 'step-wise' increase of corticosteroids but the response is often poor as this 'one size fits all' approach does not benefit all patients. Characterising a patient?s response to treatment will help our understanding of non-response and will aid development of new drugs and is the key to delivering personalised medicine in severe asthma.
The successful candidate will be embedded within the MRC funded Refractory Asthma Stratification Programme (RASP-UK) Consortium (http://www.rasp.org.uk/) which brings together a partnership of clinical and academic excellence from UK and Irish Universities and Severe Asthma Centres, together with the Pharmaceutical Industry. The primary focus is to target corticosteroid treatments more effectively and to understand why some patients do not respond to corticosteroids. Our industry partners are developing new treatments for severe asthma that will be tested in these patients and asthma 'biomarkers' will be identified to predict response to these new therapies.
Biomarker based stratification of severe asthma within the programme will identify two populations of severe asthma patients, with different patterns of lung inflammation, one with corticosteroid responsive disease which we call "T2-High" severe asthma and the other with corticosteroid unresponsive disease or "T2-Low" severe asthma. The T2-High group will be available for clinical trials of new treatments which have already been developed by the Pharmaceutical Industry. We currently understand much less about the T2-Low group, so these patients will be studied intensively to help us understand mechanisms of disease in this group.