Setting our priorities

We created our strategy by bringing together the expert knowledge and opinions of people with asthma, researchers, healthcare professionals, the major UK funding agencies, the pharmaceutical industry and the Department of Health.

By involving a diverse range of people, and emphasising the opinions and experiences of people with asthma, we are confident that our strategy plays a vital role in helping asthma researchers focus on the areas of research with greatest potential to benefit people with asthma.

At the moment our research strategy is in two parts: the Basic Asthma Research Strategy (BARS) and Clinical Asthma Research Strategy (CARS).

BARS focuses on so-called ‘basic research’ and deals with questions that could be answered through detailed scientific studies. Often, the end results of basic research don’t have an immediate medical application. However, we expect basic researchers to have an end goal in sight, such as the creation of new asthma treatments, or improving asthma diagnosis.

For example, in 2008 we funded a research project led by Professor Fan Chung in London. He and his colleagues are using a variety of scientific tests to identify key molecules inside airway muscle cells that are responsible for severe asthma symptoms. The identification of such molecules could lead to the creation of new treatments that target them, potentially leading to more effective treatments for people with severe asthma.

The aim of CARS is to provide a focus for clinical and medical asthma research. It deals with research questions that can only be answered through the involvement of people with asthma. For example, in 2009 we agreed funding for a Belfast study, led by Dr Liam Heaney, to find out if giving a course of anti-depressants to depressed individuals with severe asthma would improve both their mental health and asthma symptoms.

Every research project we fund must have a clear goal in terms of improving the lives of people with asthma. There should be a continual flow of information from scientific studies into the development of medical products, such as new treatments, diagnostic tools or interventions that can help people manage their asthma symptoms.

In order to place greater emphasis on the concept that scientific research should lead to medical products, we plan to move towards a single research strategy. This will emphasise the role of translational studies, the series of research steps necessary to take a scientific discovery through to a point where the potential medical benefit is clear.