Current Pharmaceutical Design - Volume 17, Issue 7, 2011

The 10% of patients with the most severe asthma are responsible for a large part of healthcare expenditure and morbidity. Understanding the processes involved is key if new therapeutic approaches are to be developed. Evidence is accumulating that chronic diseases such as asthma are associated with temporal and spatial alterations in the pattern of inflammatory gene expression within the airways. Expression of these Read More

Severe asthma is a complex heterogeneous disease with substantial unmet clinical need. Understanding the immunopathogenesis is likely to provide insights into potential novel therapies. To date researchers have focussed primarily at a single scale for example genome, cell or whole organ physiology. In this review we shall summarise the current knowledge of the immunopathogenesis of severe asthma integrated acr Read More

The disproportionate cost of treating asthmatic patients who do not respond to conventional anti-inflammatory therapies makes delineation of the mechanism for glucocorticoid resistance an important field of asthma research. Unbiased cluster analysis indicates that asthma is a syndrome with a number of distinct phenotypes and 5-10% of asthmatics fall into this category of relative glucocorticoid insensitivity. This sub-populatio Read More

Mast cells, traditionally regarded as effector cells of the immune system, have more recently been demonstrated to be key figures in initiating, developing and sustaining complex pathophysiological processes underlying asthma and other allergic diseases. Asthma is characterised by airway inflammation alongside a disturbance to airway physiology manifesting as variable airflow obstruction and airway hyper-responsiveness Read More

The pharmaceutical industry is interested in developing new treatments for severe asthma (SA), recognising that there is a substantial unmet clinical need in this area. However, it faces a significant set of barriers in attempting to do so, including a) problems arising from the way SA is defined, b) the heterogeneity of this condition, c) poor understanding of its aetiology, d) the absence of validated animal and tissue or c Read More

Severe asthma is a complex and heterogeneous phenotype characterized by persistent symptoms and poor control. While some patients respond to high doses of inhaled corticosteroids in combination with long-acting beta-agonists, a significant subset require oral corticosteroids to achieve symptom control. This issue has led to the development of alternative therapeutic strategies for severe asthma. This article provides an Read More

Dihydrofolate reductase (DHFR) has been used as a target for antimicrobial drug discovery against a variety of pathogenic microorganisms, including opportunistic microorganisms; Pneumocystis carinii (pc), Toxoplasma gondii (tg) and Mycobacterium avium complex (ma). In this regard, several DHFR inhibitors are reported against pc and tg and ma. However, selectivity issue of these inhibitors over human DHFR often pr Read More