Mucus Plugs are in the Spotlight
New research findings on the role of mucus in COPD and asthma patients have put a spotlight on mucus plugging. Studies have found 25-57%1-3 of those with COPD have mucus plugs. For asthma, plugs occur in about 58% of patients4. Plugs are now understood to be clinically meaningful--an independent factor in outcomes, including mortality5.
The ability to quantitatively measure mucus plugs has become increasingly important, especially for pharmaceutical companies needing to measure a therapy's impact on mucus. The "pioneering study" presented at ERS22 is one recent example of this trend.
Measuring Mucus Plugs Has Been Expensive and Time Consuming Unfortunately, conventional means of mucus scoring are exceptionally slow and costly. As one can imagine, a manual visual review of 558-1,334 airways is tedious, time consuming, and expensive to include as a clinical trial endpoint.
VIDA's Approach
VIDA has built a custom, semi-automated, AI-driven mucus scoring workflow to make mucus assessment feasible. For pharmaceutical vendors considering the addition of mucus scoring in their trials, VIDA enables a cost-effective path to include this powerful biomarker.
Get the White Paper 👆
In this white paper, we provide a physiological overview of mucus plugging (especially in relation to asthma and COPD), challenges with assessing mucus burden, new scoring approaches that have emerged, and VIDA’s novel approach to streamlining the quantification of mucus plugs for clinical trials.
