11.09.2024 Understanding and Treating the Lung Disease COPD Better

International conference on September 19 and 20, 2024 in Marburg sheds light on the opportunities for personalized treatment

Chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) leads to shortness of breath, chronic coughing, and fatigue. The symptoms can result in functional limitations, hospitalization, and death. COPD affects 65 million people worldwide and is responsible for the death of around 3.2 million people every year. These figures are predicted to rise by 30 percent within 10 years. In Europe, five to ten percent of adults over 40 suffer from COPD, which leads to 1.1 million hospital admissions every year. The socio-economic costs per patient for treatment, loss of work, and quality of life are estimated to be up to 37,000 euros.

It is an important goal for patients, their relatives, and also for society to better understand this disease and to improve treatment methods and the earliest possible diagnosis. As COPD is often accompanied by other diseases, individualized treatment approaches of personalized medicine are required and its diagnosis is much more difficult. It is estimated that 60 to 85 percent of cases, particularly mild to moderate COPD, initially remain undiagnosed.

As part of the BMBF-funded PerMed-COPD research platform, an international symposium will be held in Marburg on September 19 and 20, which will focus on various interdisciplinary aspects of the disease and its treatment tailored to each individual patient. Such personalized treatment approaches are currently being investigated for a variety of diseases and offer the prospect of novel and extremely promising methods that not only improve diagnosis and the development of treatment recommendations through the use of artificial intelligence, but can also make everyday work in hospitals much easier. 

The symposium not only aims at experts from the clinical and molecular sciences. Physicians, patients, and members of patient associations are also explicitly invited to take part in the symposium. The topics of the presentations range from the influence of the weather on the symptoms of COPD patients to the interaction with other diseases, e. g., alpha-1-antitrypsin deficiency or bronchiectasis. The symposium focusses particularly on the latest findings on molecular and digitalized treatment approaches, the central topics of the PerMed-COPD platform. "We are delighted that we have been able to attract renowned experts from Germany and other European countries and thus to create an exciting and up-to-date program. The conference will have a major impact on our future research activities," comments Prof. Dr. Bernd Schmeck, Director of the Institute for Lung Research at the University of Marburg, who is organizing this symposium together with Prof. Dr. Claus Vogelmeier, Head of the Department of Internal Medicine with a focus on Pneumology at the UKGM.

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