Creating new treatments

Asthma treatments have come a long way, and many people with asthma are now able to live almost completely without asthma symptoms.

However, a significant proportion of people with asthma still experience distressing and debilitating symptoms despite daily medication, and some treatments, such as steroid tablets, can cause significant side effects.

Recently, there has been much excitement over the development of a treatment for allergic asthma called Xolair, but this is very expensive and is only suitable for a proportion of people with severe allergic asthma. It can also only be given by injection.

We are funding Professor Brian Sutton and colleagues at the MRC-Asthma UK Centre in Allergic Mechanisms of Asthma at King’s College London, who are world experts on IgE – the molecule targeted by Xolair. They hope to develop new treatments for allergic asthma that will be much cheaper than Xolair, and could potentially be effective for many more people.

The many different cells of our immune system each play a different role in asthma, and their involvement varies from person to person. Across the UK, Asthma UK scientists are investigating immune cells to gain new insights that could lead to the creation of precisely targeted, powerful new treatments.