CURE - An EU Horizon 2020 project to find a cure for asthma
Research - Athens, , Greece
CURE - An EU Horizon 2020 project to find a cure for asthma Employees
CURE - An EU Horizon 2020 project to find a cure for asthma Details
Many asthma patients have access to a better life thanks to treatments that allow them to keep their disease under control, but their dream to get rid of asthma is not yet there. Despite the great advances in the understanding and phenotyping of different types of asthma, today there is no record of treatments able to cure it. But what if this complex disease requires out-of-the box thinking? Asthma is a disease that seems to require highly innovative studies to be cured.For example, what if we try to cure asthma through virus therapies? By looking at the results of a previous EU-funded project (PREDICTA), researchers from the Universities of Manchester and Athens have detected viral microbial imbalance in children with asthma; at the same time, bacterial viruses (phages) seem to be reduced in asthmatic patients. A possible link may reveal the ability of phages to control bacterial populations and thus bacterial imbalances and inflammation. The CURE project (funded by the EU programme Horizon 2020) proposes a phage therapy that could control the immune dysregulation of the disease and may eventually be able to cure it. The project consortium investigates how phage addition impacts the ecology of the airways and will design appropriate interventions for further use in clinical trials.The CURE project is coordinated by the University of Athens (NKUA) and involves several universities, -such us the University of Manchester (UMAN), the Lodz University (MUL) and the Umea University (UMEA)-, research centres -such us the Swiss Research Institute for High Altitude Climate and Medicine Davos (SIAF), Biomedical Research Foundation of the Academy of Athens (BRFAA) and the Giorgi Eliava Institute of Bacteriophagy, Microbiology and Virology (ELIAVA)-, two SMEs -Eliava Bio Preparations Ltd (ELIBIO) and Exelixis Research Management (EXEL)-, and one non-profit organisation, the European Federation of Allergy and Airways Diseases Patients' Associations (EFA).
