EFA Partners in the New Project (EARIP) that Kicks off in September 2013
An exciting new European Asthma Research and Innovation Partnership (EARIP), led by Asthma UK and funded by the EU Research Programme FP7, has EFA excited after its successful kick off meeting in Barcelona on Monday, September 9th which brought together consortium members for the first time to discuss the project and its aims. EARIP seeks to lay foundations for a coordinated pan-Europe research activity with objectives of reducing asthma attacks, emergency healthcare utilisation and asthma deaths in adults and children.
The project seeks to bring together a wide network of stakeholders ranging from policymakers to researchers and from clinicians to patients themselves with the intention of facilitating best practices, such as national asthma programmes across the European continent. EFA will be contributing to the project as the lead for Work Package (WP) 3a, ‘To develop better and more efficient health and care systems.’ EFA will coordinate with Asthma UK, the University of Lodz and other collaborators for the WP to ensure the timely completion of its key tasks for WP3a, which include:
- the publication of a literature review detailing national asthma programmes already existing and research gaps for measuring the health and care system changes in the field of asthma
- a public event serving as an expert stakeholder workshop at the European Parliament, which would develop recommendations and discuss the needs for the purposes of European healthcare system change in asthma. A second workshop with consortium members will evaluate the results of this public event and assist in extracting the most important outcomes for a final event report.
At the kick-off meeting, the work package partners took turns introducing their project responsibilities to all consortium members. As the first face to face meeting for consortium members, it served as a unique opportunity to bridge objectives and see where each WP would complement each other. The desired outcomes of the project are broad and ‘pan-European’ in nature, which serves as the EARIP project’s strength as successfully meeting project objectives could adequately address asthma as a European issue and help to reduce its prevalence and costs. The consortium members present agreed EARIP is a promising means to politically and innovatively propel asthma to attract attention it deserves and appear higher on the political and research agendas of the European Union. More information here.
ERS Congress: Severe Asthma Patients Less Responsive to Treatment
People with severe asthma are less likely to respond to the treatment they depend on, when compared to people with mild asthma. This is the result of the first analysis of a cohort of patients from the EU-funded U-BIOPRED project, presented at the European Respiratory Society (ERS) Annual Congress in Barcelona in September 2013. Although asthma is common, it is not widely known that there are different types of the condition. Experts don’t yet understand why some people suffer a more severe form of the disease than others.
The aim of the U-BIOPRED project is to categorise the disease into sub-groups and develop more personalised medicine. At the meeting, a second study from the U-BIOPRED project was also presented. It included breath samples from 57 patients and was able to find common patterns within four sub-groups of severe asthma patients. Peter Sterk, project lead for U-BIOPRED, concluded: "The findings of both these studies take us one step closer to understanding more about severe asthma." Read the press release or visit U-BIOPRED's website.