LIZZY Gorczyca didn't know what she was missing out on until a new treatment for severe asthma proved to be a "lifechanger".
"You don't know what you don't know," the Hunter woman said.
"You just get used to what you're living with."
Ms Gorczyca has been an asthmatic for as long as she can remember, but when her symptoms became "much worse" last year, she was placed onto a large clinical trial run out of the Hunter that uses "revolutionary" gene sequencing technology to pinpoint targeted treatment options for people with severe asthma.
"When I was put on the new treatment, I remember just laying there thinking, 'I can breathe!', she said. "I was breathing in deeper, and it was lasting."
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Ms Gorczyca said her constant fatigue disappeared, and it had made a "dramatic difference" to her quality of life. She no longer felt "limited".
"I remember describing it to my doctors as feeling like a caged bird released. That's what it felt like in those first couple of months. It was just, wow," she said. "I got a bit excited in the beginning and did all this extra exercise, just because I could. I started running, I was cycling. I've cut that back a lot now, but I was so excited. For people with severe asthma, it's a lifechanger, without a doubt."
She had not had an asthma attack since going on the new treatment.
Ms Gorczyca's treatment on the clinical trial was supported by the work of Professor Gerard Kaiko, who has been exploring biomarkers in asthma to identify more personalised, targeted therapies to cut through the options and find what is most likely to work and make a difference for patients.
"As diseases, such as asthma, increasingly have more and more treatment options, we're moving to what's called precision medicine," Professor Kaiko said. "We need to develop systems or tests to identify what drug is best for what patient. Essentially what we're doing is trying to develop a system to help match the right patient to the optimal drug for them - and this can help to facilitate clinical decision making. We're doing this in asthma, but this is going to be a growing area of need for multiple diseases in the next five years as more and more treatment options - especially in the inflammatory disease space - come on to the market."
Professor Kaiko said they were using gene sequencing technology that allowed them to investigate all the genes in each individual cell in the blood, rather than the blood as a mixture.
"The old technology had an averaging, or a masking effect of differences in rarer cells, but the new technology gets around this and helps us look at each individual cell, and see what each cell can do," he said. "What we're trying to do is develop a biomarker test, and the goal is to be able to do a blood test, and say 'This patient would do best on this drug or this drug', or 'This is the likely outcome of this patient on drug A, versus drug B'."
Professor Kaiko and a team of researchers from HMRI and the University of Newcastle recently secured a share in the $6.9 million GSK AustraliaInvestigator Sponsored Studies (ISS) program to support their work. The funding would help them identify biomarkers that would help predict which patients might respond well to different treatments.
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