Developing Novel Therapies for the Personalised Treatment of Obstructive Sleep Apnoea in Adults and Children

Current clinical management of obstructive sleep apnoea (OSA), a common sleep disorder in both children and adults, uses constant positive airway pressure as first-line treatment but is poorly tolerated by many. Consequently, a more sophisticated/personalised approach to better target treatments to differing underlying physiological deficits and their characteristic respiratory phenotypes is required. This broad research stream aims to: 1) Understand the physiology causing an individual’s OSA in both children and adults 2) Use this information to refine deployable methods to allow personalised treatment of OSA using therapies targeted to each individual’s main causal deficits. 3) Our research program often involves trialling novel drugs (or combinations of interventions) to assess efficacy. We have partnered with both adult (A/Prof Hamilton) and paediatric (A/Prof Nixon) sleep specialists which enables us to perform cutting-edge clinical research that can be directly translated to the clinic. This work hopes to provide a set of clinical tools for phenotyping patients with OSA and identifying patient-specific treatments to revolutionize how OSA is currently managed: this advance beyond the current treatments for OSA would offer patients a greater range of treatment options, and thereby improve treatment adherence as well as quality of life and health outcomes.