Adherium’s Smartinhaler selected for multisite study in EU

By Heather Mack

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Melbourne, Australia-based smart inhaler company Adherium has been selected to supply the technology for a multi-country research program in Europe that will seek to establish whether home monitoring and mobile health tools can be used to manage asthma.

Adherium’s Smartinhaler technology, which uses sensors to track when medication is taken and then sends the data via Bluetooth to mobile devices and desktop computers, will power the EU’s myAirCoach program, a multisite study funded under the EU’s Horizon 2020 Framework for Research and Innovation initiative.  For the next year, the Smartinhaler will be used at Imperial College London, University of Manchester, and Leiden University Medical Center to help patients manage their condition.  The project is coordinated by the Center for Research and Technology in Greece.

“The myAirCoach program will help asthma sufferers to manage their health through user-friendly tools that will increase awareness of their clinical state as well as their adherence and the effectiveness of medical treatment they follow,” Dr. Omar Usmani, Clinical Senior Lecturer and Consultant Physician in Respiratory Medicine at the National Heart and Lung Institute at Imperial College London, said in a statement.

The program will use a range of Adherium’s products using medications made by AstraZeneca and GSK. Based on the outcomes of myAirCoach, researches expect the program to see the basis for widespread adoption on sensor-based digital tools for a number of respiratory conditions.

Adherium has been involved in a number of studies, and the results have been published in peer-reviewed journals including Thorax and Lancet Respiratory Medicine. In November, the results of a  study conducted at Sheffield Children’s Hospital in the UK showed the Smartinhaler to increased medication adherence by 43 percent and reduce hospitalization by a factor of five. In February, researchers at the Medical Research Institute of New Zealand announced plans to launch a multi-country study involving 675 adults and investigating the safety and efficacy of three different treatment regimens for mild asthma.

“Successful disease management and prevention is only truly achieved by understanding the real-world complexity of our lives,” Adherium Founder and Group CEO Garth Sunderland said in a statement. “The best way to do that is through rich data collected in the real world. By providing our innovative solutions to people with asthma, we can help people take the right medicine, at the right dose, at the right time and in the right way.”