U-BIOPRED

Increased focus on asthma research

Two professors from the University of Copenhagen are the only Danish participants in a large European asthma project. The aim of the project is to develop new methods of treatment for patients with severe asthma, which can not be controlled with standard inhalation medicine.

The project will follow and examine thousands of children and adults with severe asthma for several years. We will try to uncover all aspects of the serious lung disease with the aim of developing completely new types of treatment, says professor Jørgen Vestbo, who is Clinical Professor in Lung Disease at Hvidovre Hospital. Together with Professor Hans Bisgaard from the Danish Pediatric Asthma Center at Gentofte Hospital he constitutes the Danish contribution to the European asthma project ‘Unbiased Biomarkers for the Prediction of Respiratory Disease Outcome’ (U-BIOPRED).

EU-collaboration with industry

The asthma project runs as a close collaboration between academia and industry. The total budget is 17 million Euro (about 125 million DKK). Half of the funding comes from EU, while the other half is financed by industry through payment for services such as analyses.

The project has been selected within the area of lung medicine by the European Innovative Medicines Initiative (IMI), which is a collaboration between EU and the European Federation of Pharmaceutical Industries and Associations (EFPIA). The purpose of IMI is to strengthen innovation in the European pharmaceutical industry by facilitating collaboration between academic researchers and industry.