New drugs for asthma; current status and future perspectives.

ABSTRACT

In most asthmatic patients, asthma symptoms can be well controlled through the pharmaco- logical interventions using combination with inhaled corticosteroids(ICSs) and/long-acting beta2-agonists(LABA) inhalers. However, there are some severe cases who did not respond to the current asthma therapy. One of topic of development for new asthma drugs is molecular targeting therapy such as anti-Th2-cytokine antibody and chemoattractant recep- tor-homologous molecule expressed on Th2 cells (CRTH2) inhibitors. Other topics are new type of combination inhalers with ICS, LABA, and long-acting muscarinic antagonists (LAMA) inhalers, and development of generic inhalers. In this review, we discussed the current trend of drug development for the asthma treatment.