BioIT World, Oct 1 2014.  By Bio-IT World Staff.

The U-BIOPRED project began with a big goal: to understand the factors that define severe asthma cases, splitting the disease into meaningful subtypes that may let doctors form better prognoses and treatment strategies. Ultimately, the project hopes to discover biomarkers that could be used to quickly diagnose subtypes of asthma, or even lead to new therapies. To do that, researchers are combining data from longitudinal clinical studies of both adults and children, and animal, in vitro and in silico models of the disease. Under the U-BIOPRED banner, a battery of multi-omics technologies is producing an unprecedented wealth of data on the cellular changes that underlie severe asthma.

BIOPRED, or Unbiased BIOmarkers in PREDiction of respiratory disease outcomes, is a project of the Innovative Medicines Initiative (IMI), the largest European public-private partnership in the field of medicine, with a specific goal of laying the groundwork for new pharmaceuticals. The IMI invested €20 million ($25.4 million) in U-BIOPRED, distributed to a consortium that includes 20 academic institutions, ten members of the commercial European Federation of Pharmaceutical Industries and Associations, six patient advocacy groups, and others.

 

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