1 March 2007

Discovery of Asthma Attack Gene may lead to novel steroid-sparing treatments

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Potential for a new asthma medicine that could move away from current steroid treatments has been unlocked by researchers at the University of Dundee.

The Dundee team have discovered that a certain form of the PPAR Gamma gene makes young asthmatics two to three times more likely to suffer acute asthma attacks.

The PPAR gamma gene has been thoroughly researched in other medical areas at the University of Dundee, including by teams working on diabetes, cancer and heart disease, but the crossover to asthma has produced exciting results, explained Dr Somnath Mukhopadhyay, consultant paediatrician at the Children’s Asthma & Allergy Unit within Tayside Children’s Hospital.

"There has been a lot of work done on the role of the PPAR gamma gene in other chronic diseases, including some excellent work by our colleagues here in Dundee," said Dr Mukhopadhyay, who has led the new research with Dr Colin Palmer of the Biomedical Research Centre in Dundee.

"While previous work had identified the adverse role of this form of the PPAR gamma gene, called ProC, in heart disease and diabetes, we have approached this from a different perspective and have found that the ProC form of PPAR gamma has strong links with acute attacks in asthmatics. Importantly this increased risk is apparent in asthmatic children taking all the different current asthma medications."

"The exciting thing is that, drugs which target PPAR gamma are already available and used to treat type 2 diabetes. If these drugs also correct the problems this genetic configuration causes in terms of increased proneness to asthma attacks, then this is potentially a major boost in how we treat asthma."

"The next step for us is to investigate whether these drugs, which do not carry any of the side-effects of steroids, do have the effect of protecting asthmatics from acute asthma attacks."

The current range of treatments for asthma is dominated by steroid therapies which are viewed as being far from ideal. If the available drug treatments relating to PPAR Gamma are proved to have strong benefits for asthmatics, it would open up a novel area of asthma treatment, saving tens of millions of pounds spent on the early (phase 1) testing of new therapies.

Asthma attacks are one of the commonest causes of school absences, hospital admissions and GP visits in the UK. They cost the NHS over £ 100m a year. Nearly 13 million UK working days are lost to asthma every year.

The Dundee research is published in Clinical Pharmacology and Therapeutics, a journal of the Nature publishing group.

NOTES TO EDITORS

Dr Mukhopadhyay and Dr Palmer lead the BREATHE study within the Children’s Asthma and Allergy Unit, Tayside Children’s Hospital and the Population Pharmacogenetics Group of the Biomedical Research Centre, examining genes and how they interact with medicines and the environment in children and young adults in Tayside. They have previously published research on a series of key findings describing gene defects relating to asthma and eczema.

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