Cheaper and More Effective Asthma Treatment? Molecular Allergy Chip Helps
A simple blood test could transform asthma treatment—making it more precise, effective, and affordable. Researchers from the Medical University of Vienna and Karl Landsteiner University of Health Sciences have developed a molecular allergy chip that can detect allergic asthma in individual patients. The study, published in the journal Allergy, shows that as many as 70% of patients could benefit from available, targeted immunotherapy.
Asthma is one of the most common chronic lung diseases, affecting approximately 300 million people worldwide. Although medical advances have made significant progress, most patients still receive standard symptomatic treatment: inhaled corticosteroids and bronchodilators.
In recent years, expensive biological therapies have also emerged for selected patients, raising questions about the long-term cost-effectiveness of asthma care. Meanwhile, for the most common form of the disease – allergic asthma – an effective and less expensive method exists: allergen-specific immunotherapy (AIT). The challenge until now has been quickly and reliably identifying patients who will benefit from it.
The new solution was developed by Dr. Huey-Jy Huang's team from KL Krems in collaboration with MedUni Vienna. The chip contains 63 allergen molecules from the most common sources: pollen, house dust mites, mold, and animal dander.
Researchers tested it on blood samples from 436 asthma patients from the large LEAD cohort. The results showed that over 70% of them had specific sensitizations—that is, allergic asthma. These patients were characterized by younger age, better lung function, and less steroid dependence, despite having fewer signs of inflammation.
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"The results show that a large proportion of adult asthma patients have allergic asthma – and that we can identify them quickly and precisely," says Prof. Rudolf Valenta from MedUni Vienna, co-author of the study and head of the research team at KL Krems. "This is important because allergic asthma can be treated causally, not just symptomatically, using specific allergen immunotherapy."
AIT is a well-known method in allergology – it involves gradual desensitization of the body to the allergen causing symptoms. When used in appropriate patients, it can reduce the number of disease flare-ups and improve long-term treatment outcomes.
The chip uses purified allergen molecules, allowing it to distinguish true allergies from cross-reactions. This, in turn, increases the chances of accurate therapeutic decisions and effective treatment.
"We hope that this diagnostic method will find application in routine clinical practice. It could enable many patients to benefit from effective and affordable immunotherapy while reducing the unnecessary use of expensive biologic drugs," emphasizes Professor Valenta.
Researchers argue that integrating molecular diagnostics into everyday clinical practice could shift the focus of therapy from general symptom relief to a precise, disease-modifying approach.
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