The Innovative Medicines Initiative (IMI) has published an interview with Professor Peter Sterk, coordinator of U-BIOPRED, one of the first projects launched by the IMI in 2009.
According to Sterk, U-BIOPRED’s three main accomplishments are (i) the launch of a new concept of looking at severe asthma, which led to the intuition that there are more types of severe asthma, (ii) the successful involvement of the patients and (iii) the development of concrete ways of analyzing all molecules and clinical abnormalities in individual patients by using Big Data.
But most importantly U-BIOPRED is contributing to the development of new drugs: by using the so-called U-BIOPRED handprints (sub-types of severe asthma) at the beginning of the clinical studies, drug companies can determine patients’ asthma handprints and then, after the treatment, the respondents to treatment and the non-respondents to treatment are being compared to their handprint at the beginning of the study. This means that patients they will not be treated unnecessarily with drugs that don’t work for their subtype of asthma. In achieving this, the IMI had a key role, because it enabled scientists and pharmaceutical companies to work together on a single project.
The IMI was also fundamental in the promotion of the work done by the individual patients involved in the project since it supported the publication of a guide for successful patient involvement in research, summarising the patients’ experience in the project and providing tips and advice for people writing applications for EU healthcare research projects or who have had a proposal funded and are in the project development stage. The booklet was released in English and has now been translated into several European languages. You can find all versions here.
To know more about this project, please visit our dedicated U-BIOPRED section.