Competition Fuels the Development of New Asthma Treatments

A rush to develop groundbreaking injectable asthma treatments has reached breakneck speeds as rival drug production firms jockey for a slice of a market estimated to be worth approximately $7.5 billion.

Modern drug companies like Roche, Teva, Sanofi, and AstraZeneca Pharmaceuticals are racing against one another to develop a safe and adequate injectable treatment for asthma.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has estimated that there are well over 18.5 million adults suffering from asthma in the United States alone. Of that number, up to 20 percent of those patients are not adequately treated for their condition with traditional inhaled steroids alone.

According to recent reports, design antibody-based drugs have already proven remarkably effective at reducing asthma attacks in patients with severe asthma in clinical trials. In fact, drug companies are reporting reductions in life-threatening asthma attack by 40 to 60 percent. This is fantastic news for serious asthma sufferers who especially live in polluted regions, where attacks are commonly the worst.

The drugs, injected straight into the blood stream of a patient, work as fast-acting solutions that neutralize key inflammatory chemicals produced in the body that drive asthma attacks. Targeting asthma at its source allows these medications to even help patients who have proven resistant to standard inhaled steroid treatment.

Being one of the first companies to get this drug to hit the U.S. and world markets could potentially dethrone Britain's GlaxoSMithKline, the leader in asthma treatments ever since it pioneered inhaler-based treatments back in the mid 1960s.

Development of the drug will also help sell that the producer is caught up with the times to potential investors. Biomarkers are becoming a popular subject of choice in research labs across the country, but the concept is slowly making their way into the business world as well as a huge money saver.

Patients considering the new drugs are likely to be given the option to undergo a "biomarker" blood test to determine if they are likely to benefit from taking the medication. This is great news for healthcare providers and insurers, who naturally wouldn't want to pay for medication that isn't effectively treating their client.

More can be read about this race to the next big treatment for asthmatics in a Reuters report.