The current approach to drug discovery in respiratory medicine is not sophisticated enough to meet the needs of the industry and patients, an expert group says.
At a European Respiratory Society summit set up to identify some of the barriers to drug discovery the group noted that drug development in respiratory medicine was way behind that of other common disease areas.
For instance the cumulative probability of respiratory drugs reaching the market was only 3% compared to 6–14% for other disease areas such as HIV/AIDS, haematology, cardiovascular, dermatology, cancer and neurological disease.
This was despite many “new” respiratory drugs being improvements on existing classes of drug, such as long-acting β2-agonists, long-acting muscarinic antagonists, safer inhaled corticosteroids (ICS) and longer acting antibiotics.
The reasons for the higher attrition rate needs to be better understood in order to address the issue, said the group who reported their findings in an editorial published in the European Respiratory Journal.
The problem was almost certainly multifactorial and included a poor understanding of the underlying disease mechanism, poor animal models for testing new treatments, difficulties of developing drugs for inhaled delivery, and a lack of investment in respiratory research and respiratory drug development.
“Respiratory diseases remain an area of considerable unmet medical need and it is valid to question whether the current approach to drug discovery in this area is sophisticated enough to meet the needs of the industry and patients,” they wrote.