A PIONEERING drugs trial has started in Bradford to help protect patients who suffer from a lung disease from a bug that worsens their condition and often lands them in hospital.

Patients in the district with Chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) are trialling the drug and are being closely monitored by experts to see if their quality of life improves.

If the drug works it could lessen the burden of GP waiting times and the demand on hospital beds which would bring about huge benefits for the overstretched NHS, according to Dr Dinesh Saralaya, consultant respiratory physician and researcher at Bradford Institute of Health Research within Bradford Royal Infirmary.

Bradford Teaching Hospitals is one of seven research centres taking part in the trial, which sees patients vaccinated twice against a bug called H.Influenza which makes more phlegm and causes complications for patients, sometimes even death.

The ten to 15 patients taking part so far in the Bradford part of the study will be closely monitored and followed up for one year after receiving the vaccinations to see if their quality of life improves, said Dr Saralaya.

He said: "Bradford is one of the four biggest centres for COPD research and an emerging site in Europe for excellence in its COPD research. Bradford also has a large COPD population giving us a good patient cohort to enrol into trials and has Yorkshire's second highest hospitalisation rate of COPD patients."

COPD is the name for a collection of lung diseases including chronic bronchitis, emphysema and chronic obstructive airways disease. Primarily, sufferers experience difficulty breathing due to narrowing of their airways - the most common cause is smoking.

Experts in Bradford have also been trail-blazing the use of a new bronchodilator – a treatment method to open up the breathing tubes, that study was looking at whether a single bronchodilator was better than a combination of two bronchodilators.

COPD affects about three million people in the UK and is the nation's fifth biggest killer disease. Each year, more than 30,000 Britons die directly or indirectly as a result of the disease, whose symptoms include chronic coughing and increasing shortness of breath.

Early diagnosis and treatment is regarded as vital to keep lung damage to a minimum and reduce the massive long-term cost of caring for patients, figures from the Department of Health show that earlier diagnosis and treatment of the disease could save the NHS more than £1 billion over 10 years.