Grant: Catalyst Grant: Personalized Health Catalyst Grants

Asthma is the most common disease of children and is a leading healthcare cost for people of all ages. Asthma is caused by airway narrowing from abnormal inflammation. When people can't breathe then come into hospital. This is scary for kids (and adults) and it is expensive for the healthcare system. Other diseases cause airway obstruction, but the inflammation is different and the treatment is different. Doctors want to select the right drug at the right time to decrease airway inflammation and prevent hospital visits. Unfortunately, measuring airway problems and inflammation is difficult in a typical doctor's office. A noninvasive test is not available, especially for doctors taking care of small children. Instead, doctors give out trials of therapy, a strategy that wastes money and often does not always help the patient. Metabolomics is the study of small molecules generated from cellular metabolic activity. Diseases like asthma have different cells in the lungs compared to other respiratory diseases (e.g. viral infection). This creates different metabolites. Sicker lungs stress the body more causing different metabolites. Urine is an excellent biological fluid because it's easy to collect and it's rich in chemical composition. We have been studying urine in adults and kids with various lung diseases, and we believe we are close to a non-invasive urine test to measure these metabolites, which will diagnose and manage these diseases better than the current approach. We now need to study larger groups of people with respiratory diseases to validate the test. There are saved urine samples from adults and children with different airway diseases like asthma in Canada. Funds from this grant will allow us to study these samples and confirm that we have a test for asthma or asthma like diseases. We could then run clinical trials using the test to show how treatment could be better targeted to the right person at the right time. This would prevent hospital visits.