Researchers at the Firestone Institute for Respiratory Health at St. Joseph’s Healthcare Hamilton, led by Dr. Terence Ho, have recently published a systematic review and meta-analysis that analyzed clinical trial data surrounding the efficacy of a new class of asthma drugs.
Like many diseases, asthma and asthma exacerbations are caused by the immune system misbehaving. Fortunately for patients at St. Joe’s, researchers at the Firestone Institute have been at the forefront of understanding how the immune system contributes to asthma and have been performing clinical trials to personalize treatments.
However, most asthma care centres are not able to offer this degree of personalized treatment, meaning patients may have to cycle through multiple treatments before they find one that works for them.
This new class of drugs that targets alarmins – aptly named antialarmins – was previously tested in clinical trials that showed they might be useful in asthma patients with various types of inflammation. Alarmins are danger signals produced in the lungs of some people with severe asthma.
In the recently published study, however, Dr. Ho and colleagues re-evaluated the trials and found that, in fact, only patients who had eosinophilic asthma (characterized by having too many eosinophils – a type of immune cell) seemed to benefit by these treatments.
The researchers propose that further study is required to understand if these drugs work for all types of inflammation, or just the type related to eosinophils.
The study was published in The Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology.