U-BIOPRED – EISBM

U-BIOPRED – Unbiased BIOmarkers for the Prediction of REspiratory Disease outcomes

Funded under: IMI and managed by CNRS
From 01/10/2009 to 30/09/2015, closed project
More information: U-BIOPRED Website

The U-BIOPRED project aims was to speed up the development of better treatments for patients with severe asthma. Several gaps in previous knowledge make it hard to predict in the early stages of drug development how well a new experimental medicine will work in patients. One of the major difficulties is the finding that there are many different forms of severe asthma, caused by different disease mechanisms. Patients with different types of asthma may react differently to new or existing treatments.

Strategy

U-BIOPRED has designed and implemented a staged-strategy leading to a step-change in understanding severe asthma and novel drug development through:

Generating consensus and global standard operating procedures (SOPs) on diagnostic criteria, clinical phenotyping and disease outcome of severe asthma
Creating adult/paediatric cohorts and biobanks for cross-sectional and longitudinal studies in well characterized severe asthmatics and controls
Generating phenotype handprints of severe asthma by an innovative systems biology strategy (training set)
Validating the accuracy of phenotype handprints in identification of newly included patients (validation set)
Refining phenotype handprints with pre-clinical animal and human exacerbation models
Validating the handprints for their predictive efficacy in gold standard and experimental therapeutic intervention
Refining the diagnostic criteria and phenotypes of severe asthma by incorporating the newly established handprints
Establishing a platform for exchange, education and dissemination.

Innovative approach

EISBM teams in cooperation with partners have established a novel systems biology approach to integrate high dimensional data from invasive, non-invasive and patient-reported outcomes.

Consortium

The consortium includes partners from academia (20), biopharma industry (EFPIA) (9), patients/care organisations (6), SMEs (4) and multinational industry (1). U-BIOPRED has a Management Board (day-to-day management), Strategic Advisory Board (external advice), Scientific Board (integrating the 10 Workpackages), Ethics Board, Safety Board, and a General Assembly (representing all partners).