Medicine is seeing revolutionizing treatments these days. Check out the latest reports about the latest news from the asthma treatments space below.
New asthma treatment is addressed
CSL is aiming to enter the asthma market, which is worth US$21.6 billion (AU$33.54 billion), by creating a revolutionary drug that targets lung inflammation, which is a primary trigger for the chronic respiratory conditions. The drug, named trabikibart or CSL311, has the potential to make CSL a well-known name, especially in Australia where over 10% of the population (2.7 million people) suffer from asthma.
This new therapy offers hope to asthma patients who may be able to reduce their reliance on traditional steroid treatments that are typically administered through inhalers, and avoid complications such as impaired growth in children and cataracts.
According to CSL’s chief scientific officer Andrew Nash, the company aims to provide personalized treatment to patients with severe uncontrolled asthma, as opposed to the conventional approach.
“It’s a pretty competitive space, asthma. Some types of asthma are reasonably well treated at the moment, but there’s still areas of asthma that are very poorly treated with current drugs, whether they’re your more traditional inhaled corticosteroids or some of the newer-generation monoclonal antibodies,” Mr. Nash said, as per The Australian.
“There are subsets of asthma that are still treated equally poorly, and that’s what we are aiming at here.”
In 2019, the biotechnology company shared news about the creation of a recombinant monoclonal antibody. However, due to the COVID-19 pandemic, there was a delay in finding patients to participate in the trial. Now, the project has been pushed forward and is being developed in collaboration with SA Pathology’s Centre for Cancer Biology.
The product, known as CSL311, must pass three phases of clinical trials and receive regulatory approval before it can be made available for commercial use by CSL.
“Asthma is an inflammatory disease, which means there are cells in the blood that attack the body, and in asthma, the part of the body these cells are attacking is the lungs. The reason they attack the lung is that they’re revved up, super activated and really nasty, as well as a little bit blind—hurting ourselves,” Angel Lopez of SA Pathology said.
“This antibody switches them off—it effectively applies the brakes. The cells are still there, we’re not wiping them out because if you do, you might facilitate infection, but they are better controlled and less revved up.”
