Centre Seeks Better Lives For People With Asthma

A centre aiming to improve the lives of millions of people with asthma is being officially launched today.

The virtual hub, set up by charity Asthma UK, will be the first in the UK to focus solely on giving patients a better quality of life, by finding new treatments and making them available more quickly.

It's being co-ordinated by Edinburgh University and Queen Mary University of London and has been officially backed by 13 leading academics and NHS organisations.

More than five million people in the UK live with the potentially life-threatening condition, but Asthma UK says research into it is chronically underfunded, with treatments taking an average of 17 years to develop.

The charity's Chief Executive Kay Boycott said: "The introduction into clinical use of the pressurised metered-dose inhaler - the first modern inhaler for asthma management - took over 40 years from initial lab discovery through clinical trials and into practice.

"More than half a century later asthma still kills and there are tens of thousands of people with asthma facing a daily struggle to breathe. This is why it is so vital for Asthma UK to invest significantly in the Asthma UK Centre for Applied Research and to kick start a new era of improved discovery-to-treatment times."

National Director of Asthma UK Scotland, Gordon Brown, spoke to Kingdom FM News about the new centre: