Current treatments allow many asthma patients to control their disease. However, medicine is not yet capable of proposing a cure for asthma. Despite the many ground-breaking discoveries that have improved our understanding and phenotyping the different types of asthma, no development has been recorded for cures. Against this stalemate, it seems to cure asthma scientists should be approach the disease differently, in a completely disruptive way.
What if we try to cure asthma with viruses? When looking at the results of a previous EU-funded project (PREDICTA), researchers from the University of Athens have detected viral microbial imbalance in children with asthma; at the same time bacterial viruses (phages or bacteriophages are virus that infect and replicates within a bacterium) seems to be reduced in asthmapatients. Researchers would like to explore if there is a link here showing an ability of these phages to control bacterial populations in asthma patients that provoke bacterial imbalance and the chronic inflammation of asthma.
CURE, the project consortium in which EFA participates (funded by the EU programme Horizon 2020), proposes a phage therapy to control the immune dysregulation of asthma and eventually be able to cure it. To achieve this, the project consortium will investigate how phage addition impacts the ecology of our airways and will design appropriate interventions to be tested in patients.
EFA is excited to be part of the project, that was launched in Athens the 2 October to plan the work ahead. As patient representatives we are responsible for the communication activities and in particular for the organisation of the Science Festival towards the end of the project (2021).
We will provide links to the project website and social media in our next newsletter.