Andrew Kasarskis, PhD, left, and Linda Rogers, MD, are part of the asthma study team.

Asthma, a chronic disease of the airways of the lungs, is a growing public health problem that now affects 350 million people and results in about 400,000 deaths worldwide each year. Its diagnosis and treatment remain challenging, however, and debilitating symptoms, such as coughing and shortness of breath, are a major cause behind rising health care costs, missed school for children, and loss of productivity and early disability in adults.

Recently, the Mount Sinai Health System and Sema4—a patient-centered predictive health company and a venture of Mount Sinai—joined with Sanofi, one of the world’s largest pharmaceutical companies, to follow 1,200 Mount Sinai patients to gain unprecedented insights into the biological mechanisms and environmental factors implicated in this condition.

The five-year study—the first of its kind—will collect traditional clinical data, such as electronic medical records and clinical samples, including blood samples and nasal brushings, from  patients during their doctor appointments. The data will be analyzed for genomic and transcriptomic information and combined with other data collected using the patient’s mobile phone—environmental data, like air quality and pollen counts, data from the patient’s asthma inhaler, and data from home monitoring of activity and sleep. One of the unique elements of this study is that the research will be incorporated into actual clinical practice, and real-world data using remote devices will be integrated with molecular data.

“Despite advances in recent years, we still see many patients struggling with asthma, so there is a tremendous need for innovation to reduce the burden of this disease,” says Linda Rogers, MD, Associate Professor of Medicine (Pulmonary, Critical Care and Sleep Medicine) and Clinical Director of the Adult Asthma Program at the Mount Sinai – National Jewish Health Respiratory Institute. Dr. Rogers is the clinical principal investigator of the study, which is a collaboration among the Respiratory Institute, the Icahn Institute of Genomics and Multiscale Biology, Sema4, and Sanofi.

The Respiratory Institute is uniquely positioned to undertake this research. In addition to the large number of asthma patients that the program treats, the Mount Sinai and Sema4 study team have unparalleled capabilities in specimen analysis, data science, and multiscale biological modeling, allowing researchers to gather large amounts of data more rapidly than using more traditional research methods.

Clinical research teams will deploy advanced analytics on this information to better understand how the disease functions, including what triggers asthma attacks and which patient segments are most likely to respond to certain therapies. “This collection of large amounts of multiple types of data is needed to fully understand asthma—a condition researchers now believe is far more complex than was previously understood—and how best to treat patients,” says Tom Neyarapally, Sema4’s Chief Commercial Officer.

Significantly, gathering and analyzing these kinds of data from patients will demonstrate at the molecular level how their bodies are responding to asthma, says Andrew Kasarskis, PhD, Executive Vice President and Chief Data Officer for the Mount Sinai Health System and a co-principal investigator of the study. For example, analysis of a blood sample will show changes in the cellular activity, such as which proteins are being produced, and a nasal swab may reveal important clues about one’s immune response and what is happening in the lungs.

“We will define asthma subtypes clinically, then understand the molecular basis of disease in each subtype in order to discover new therapies and better manage asthma in all our patients,” says Dr. Kasarskis.

Ultimately, adds Erik Lium, PhD, Executive Vice President of Mount Sinai Innovation Partners, “this collaboration may lead to the identification of novel drug targets and the development of groundbreaking therapies to benefit all patients with asthma.”