What comes next could change how people breathe

We need treatments to change the course of lung conditions

Today’s treatments have brought us a long way, but they haven’t taken us far enough. There are lots of drugs, lots of inhalers, lots of things that can make a bit of a difference to people’s everyday lives and can sometimes help stop things from getting worse. But what we’re really lacking are new treatments that help people feel much better, reverse symptoms and, ideally, change the course of the disease and stop it in its tracks.

There are 7 million people living with a lung condition in the UK. So, what I think people with lung conditions need are treatments that are actually going to have a long-term effect, and they're going to treat symptoms really effectively. One of the problems is that if you keep on having asthma attacks or COPD exacerbations that damage your lungs, that damage is long-lasting. We need to stop that.

People with lung conditions are calling on us to work together

I originally trained as a nurse before I moved into science because I wanted to make people better. In my career to date, I’ve heard from thousands of people who are ultimately quite disappointed with the treatments they’ve been given. What people with different lung conditions have told me over the many years I've been working in this field is that they want to see the development of new treatments. Treatments that stop their lung condition from getting worse, and that actually change their lives and make their lives better. They’re calling on us as a community to work together to develop these treatments that massively slow down the deterioration and prevent lung damage.

We know what we can achieve if we all come together

The great thing is that there are lots of people around the world doing incredible science. People are working really hard getting grants, publishing papers on amazing things, but they're often working in isolation. For example, we know that a lot of the mechanisms of asthma and COPD are the same but we’re not seeing people working across disease areas. But if we were able to pull people together to work across these diseases, we’d be able to make some amazing breakthroughs over the next 5 to 10 years.

We saw what we can achieve when the research community all come together with a common purpose during the COVID-19 pandemic. Of course, nobody wants to recreate those conditions, but we can see the amazing things that we as a research community can pull out of the bag in such a small amount of time.

As a community, we can shape what comes next

Over the last few decades, Asthma + Lung UK have invested over £100 million and funded over 1000 researchers across lots of different disease areas like asthma, COPD, lung cancer, interstitial lung disease. We’d love to see others support us to try and fund more of this research.

We need to get together as a community and really focus on the shared underpinning reasons why people's lungs get poorly. Then we can start thinking about treatments that would address those underlying problems, rather than seeing these different diseases as things that are worked on independently.

And that's a role that, as a patient organisation and as a charity, we can play really well. We can bring people together, we can convene, we can talk to influential people, and we can try to galvanise this activity across sectors. If we do that, we can help shape what comes next for the millions of people living with a lung condition.