Australian Registry of Severe Cutaneous Adverse Reactions (AUS-SCAR)

AIFA Research Grant 2019

Dr Jason Trubiano, Austin Medical Research Foundation, Victoria.

High-risk drug allergies such as severe cutaneous adverse drug reactions (SCAR), are associated with mortality, excess hospital costs, demand for specialized allergy services and medication safety concerns. SCAR is of significant global impact and particularly over represented in antibiotics used to treat prevalent infectious diseases.  Although it has an associated mortality of up to 60% and significant long-term morbidity, the prevalence of SCAR and effective treatments remain ill-defined.

SCAR frequently occurs when multiple drugs are administered concurrently and a significant unmet need is validating in vitro and in vivo diagnostics to determine causality. A successful roadmap has been applied for the development of pharmacogenomic predictors to prevent SCAR, however these predictors have yet to be discovered for most drugs and populations. 

This AIFA grant will fund Phase 1 of AUS-SCAR, the AUStralian Registry for Severe Cutaneous Adverse drug Reactions. AUS-SCAR is a multidisciplinary collaboration of mixed-career stage researchers utilizing a range of clinical, health services and translational research methodologies. It will address the significant knowledge gaps in SCAR causality, prevention, diagnosis and treatment.

AUS-SCAR will collect prospective clinical data (drug causality, treatments and outcomes) and bio-banked samples (DNA, blood and skin) from patients at 15 participating Australian sites. This will be subsequently analysed in two phases:  Phase 1 will create and utilize this registry and biobank to examine SCAR (i) epidemiology and causality, (ii) pharmacogenomic predictors and (iii) being to explore novel ex vivo/in vitro diagnostics.   Phase 2 in the future will utilize the formed clinical registry and biobank to examine the immunopathogenesis and long-term treatment outcomes of SCAR.

Dr Trubiano with the Austin Health Team

Dr Jason Trubiano was awarded an AIFA grant of $30,000 celebrating ASCIA’s 30th Anniversary.