hVIVO launches groundbreaking asthma study

Human disease models pioneer hVIVO announced on Friday that its landmark asthma stratification initiative is now underway, with the first volunteer inoculated with human rhinovirus at hVIVO's London-based clinical research unit.

The AIM-traded firm said the hVIVO asthma stratification program will characterise asthma patients according to clinical and biomarker phenotypes following HRV challenge to discover a more effective way to differentiate subtypes of asthma patients - enabling the development of targeted therapies, disease biomarkers and more precision medicine-based approaches to asthma care.

It said the hVIVO asthma initiative is one of the first dynamic phenotyping projects aiming to characterise asthma not only in the static or baseline state, but also throughout the evolution of an exacerbation following viral infection - the most common cause of exacerbations of asthma.

The initiative will leverage the hVIVO viral-induced asthma exacerbation disease model to map the underlying biology associated with asthma exacerbations.

hVIVO’s board said this unique phenotyping study involves a total of 500 subjects, including both healthy and asthma patients.

It aims to define asthma phenotypes and possible endotypes through HRV-16 challenge induced clinical and biomarker changes, as well as safety and tolerability to HRV-16 challenge in healthy and a broad range of asthma subjects.

Using the hVIVO platform of human disease models, a common cold infection from human rhinovirus is generated in asthma patients, and these patients are then continuously monitored as their condition is exacerbated by the viral infection.

The approach is expected to reveal biological causality previously unseen by scientists.

In addition to phenotyping asthma patients, hVIVO’s approach is expected to discover useful biomarkers for predicting and developing more efficacious treatments for exacerbations of asthma - a vital first step to advancing more precision-medicine based treatments.

Interim data analysis is expected to be conducted in the third quarter of 2017.

“Even though millions suffer from asthma today, very little is understood about this disease,” said CEO Kym Denny.

“Even less is known about preventing asthma attacks, where viruses are the predominant cause.”

Denny said after two years in designing, planning and piloting, the company is excited to officially kick off the sample collection phase of the project.

“We believe the hVIVO platform's capability to provide a window into the disease process and capture exacerbations in action will be a powerful tool in the fight to treat and prevent asthma.”