New Evidence and Novel Therapies for Severe Asthma Management

The 2014 European Respiratory Society International Congress, held last month from 6^th-10^th September in Munich, Germany, provided a platform for key opinion leaders in the field of asthma management to disseminate new clinical data and recent developments. Despite the use of high-dose inhaled corticosteroids and long-acting β2 agonists, a proportion of patients still have uncontrolled disease and are at risk of exacerbation and hospitalisations, thus requiring the use of intermittent or continuous oral corticosteroid therapy. In severe uncontrolled asthma, exacerbations can be potentially life-threatening, and are the main cause for morbidity and mortality in asthma patients, necessitating considerable healthcare resource utilisation. Consequently, there remains an unmet need for newer therapies to manage asthma in several patient subsets, for which current therapeutic options do not yield adequate benefits and outcomes.