UPMC Children’s Pediatric Pulmonary Medicine Research Team Receives $1M Grant from Institute for Precision Medicine for Asthma Research
November 8, 2023
Earlier in 2023, the Institute for Precision Medicine (IPM), a partnership of the University of Pittsburgh and UPMC, through its Precision Medicine Implementation Program (PreMIP) awarded one of two $1 million grants to a research team from the UPMC Children’s Division of Pediatric Pulmonary Medicine for a novel asthma research project.
The research project is titled “Multi-Modal Transcriptomics for Personalized Risk Assessment in Asthma: Identifying Risk of Severe Exacerbations and Predicting Response to Biological Therapies.”
Leading the research are Wei Chen, PhD, Professor of Pediatrics in the Division of Pediatric Pulmonary Medicine, and Juan C. Celedón, MD, DrPH, Division Chief of Pediatric Pulmonary Medicine at UPMC Children’s.
About the Research Project
Drs. Chen and Celedón, using data from a cohort of 125 pediatric patients with asthma, are designing transcriptomic biomarker risk scores in nasal epithelium and blood to identify patients with childhood asthma who are at high risk of severe disease exacerbations.
The research project also will work to predict the response to biological therapies in patients with severe childhood asthma.
To accomplish these aims, the team will further integrate genome-wide transcriptomic and DNA methylation data that show the strongest associations with severe exacerbations and response to biologics in order to determine regulatory pathways associated with the expression of asthma genes and outcome prediction.
These transcriptomic risk scores could serve as prognostic biomarkers for patients with asthma and lead to the potential discovery of new therapeutic targets for the disease.
About the IPM’s PreMIP Program
The IPM’s PreMIP program funds research to accelerate precision medicine approaches leading to improved patient care through implementation and commercialization. PreMIP aims to generate data with a high level of causal evidence that may result in a change of clinical care that improves patient outcomes, reduces costs or spurs efficiency, or bolsters other measures of quality health care.
