Improved Therapy Suggestions may Benefit 235 Million Asthma Sufferers - Study Published by Dove Medical Press

     

Biologics: Targets and Therapy, published by Dove Medical Press, will highlight one of its most recently published articles: “Lebrikizumab in the personalized management of asthma."

Asthma is currently affecting about 235 million people, and is the most common chronic disease in children. It is now well appreciated that asthma is not a simple disease. According to author Dr. Neil Thomson, "Many patients with asthma have poorly controlled symptoms, and particularly for those with severe disease, there is a need for improved treatments. Reclassifying asthma with identification of sub-phenotypes has great impacts on choosing appropriate therapeutic approaches for improved treatment outcomes."

The article suggests that proper target should be chosen for individualized therapy. Accordingly, careful patient profiling and selection for clinical trials are extremely important. Moreover, many times, surrogate markers have to be used in clinical practice. This manuscript provides an excellent instruction of how to wisely choose appropriate biomarker(s) for patient classification and proper target(s) for improved therapy.

Dr. Thomson and team also outline the use of Lebrikizumab, a humanized monoclonal antibody that binds to interleukin (IL)-13. "Lebrikizumab has undergone encouraging early clinical studies in the treatment of asthma," says Thomson.

"Stratifying patients into a high Th2 phenotype using serum periostin, which is upregulated in lung epithelial cells by IL-13, may identify individuals responsive to blockade of IL-13. Future studies are underway that will help determine the long-term efficacy and safety of lebrikizumab as well as whether phenotyping patients using serum periostin allows a personalized approach to the treatment of asthma."

The authors of the article are as follows: Neil C Thomson, Institute of Infection, Immunity, and Inflammation, University of Glasgow and Respiratory Medicine, Gartnavel General Hospital, Glasgow, UK; and Manish Patel and Andrew Smith, Department of Respiratory Medicine, Wishaw Hospital, Wishaw, Lanarkshire, UK.

Biologics: Targets and Therapy is an international, peer-reviewed journal focusing on the patho-physiological rationale for and clinical application of Biologic agents in the management of autoimmune diseases, cancers or other pathologies where a molecular target can be identified.

Dove Medical Press Ltd is a privately held company specializing in the publication of Open Access peer-reviewed journals across the broad spectrum of science, technology and especially medicine.

Updated 23 July 2014