06.11.2024 Innovations for COPD Medicine – From Dependable Diagnosis to Personalization of Patient Care

International symposium hosted by PerMed-COPD in Marburg

On September 19 & 20, 2024 the PerMed-COPD platform hosted an international symposium in Marburg, which attracted the vivid attention of researchers, clinicians, COPD patients, and the pharmaceutical industry. In the fascinating atmosphere of a cinema, in which the scientific results could easily be followed on the big screens, the interesting program addressed the topics pathology & drivers, personalization, and exacerbation.

From all the talks it became more than clear that COPD as a multi-component disease is characterized by an immense heterogeneity with respect to riskfactors, drivers of progression, the course of exacerbations and finally mortality, and also a wide range of comorbidities. In this context, alpha-1 antitrypsin deficiency, bronchiectasis, or asthma play an important role as they not only influence the progression of the disease but also impede its diagnosis. In addition, the connection between the environment, e. g., weather and air quality, and lung diseases need to be addressed to better understand and predict their progression. Interesting first data were presented from the scientific programs CALM-QE and HABITAT, in which the Philipps-Universität plays an important role.

As one size doesn’t fit all, the need for more clinical studies to address questions of “omics”, such as genetic or epigenetic markers, for the characterization of endotypes and the more detailed analyses of biomarkers, such as the nasal microbiome, and of radiological data to analyze phenotypes became obvious.

In this context, the clinical platform PerMed-COPD gives an answer to the need of the personalization of diagnosis and treatment. Building on the knowledge gained from previous studies, e. g., ERACoSysMed, SysMed-COPD, or COSYCONET, the main goal of PerMed-COPD is the development of a Clinical Decision Support System (CDSS). This CDSS will support the attending physician when diagnosing the disease and deciding individually appropriate promising treatments. Employing the benefits of artificial intelligence, it is based on comorbidity clusters, defined from the above-mentioned studies, and uses a variety of the patients’ imaging and molecular biomarkers.

In addition to the speakers’ interesting talks, which had COPD as their main focus, the  posters presented latest research from the broad field of lung diseases.

The symposium received funding from the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (Bundesministerium für Bildung und Forschung, BMBF), Insmed, Grifols, AstraZeneca, CSL Behring, GSK and the German Center for Lung Research (DZL)