About Copacetic

COPACETIC is an acronym for COPD Pathology: Adressing Critical gaps, Early Treatment & diagnosis and Innovative Concepts. This project aims to generate new knowledge on the pathogenesis of COPD. Knowledge that provides insight in the individual susceptibility to develop COPD and thus explains why ‘only’ about 25 percent of all smokers will develop COPD. Knowledge that provides more insight in the critical biochemical pathways that are involved in airway obstruction and loss of lung tissue. Knowledge that also will make it possible to diagnose COPD more accurate and in an earlier stage. And, last but not least, knowledge that will give direction to effective interventions for the prevention of COPD.

The fact that some individuals develop severe forms COPD whereas others, with similar age, sex and smoking behavior, develop no symptoms of COPD strongly points towards an individual, genetically based susceptibility for the development of COPD. COPACETIC is designed to unravel this genetic background of the susceptibility for COPD. Hereto a genome-wide screening for relevant SNPs will be performed in 3500 subjects that participated in the NELSON-project, a Dutch- Belgian multi-center lung cancer screening. The Nelson-project provides an unique large set of representative clinical and biological data (e.g. lung function test, CT scans and blood samples for DNA and RNA). Relevant SNPs for COPD susceptibility will additionally be tested for replication in five cohorts: the Danish Copenhagen City Heart Study-cohort, the Polish Krakow-cohort, the Dutch Vlagtwedde/Vlaardingen cohort, the Heidelberg-cohort and the Euroscop-cohort, all of which consists of COPD-patients and controls.

COPACETIC is an collaboration of six European partners: University Medical Center Utrecht (the Netherlands), University Medical Center Groningen (the Netherlands), Hvidovre University Hospital (Denmark), Jagiellonian University School of Medicine (Poland), Heidelberg University (Germany) and AstraZeneca (Sweden). COPACETIC is funded by the European Union FP7 program. A full description of the COPACETIC project can be found in the so called Technical Annex of the Grant Agreement.

More information about the techniques used:

• CT scan
• Pulmonary function tests
• Genome wide screening

Output of the project COPACETIC

The poster and the abstract (number p522) at the ERS conference 2008 in Berlin.