Asthma breakthrough may be near
Published: January 31, 2006
In the not too distant future, asthma sufferers may look to a medical procedure to ease their symptoms instead of reaching for an inhaler or bottle of pills.
That’s if the high expectations surrounding Asthmatx Inc. pan out.
The Mountain View-based medical device company is pioneering a new way to treat the chronic disease, which affects more than 20 million Americans, through a catheter-based system that eases constriction in the lungs.
Its product is a novel approach to asthma, researchers say, and one that offers hope to patients unresponsive to current therapies.
“It’s completely different from anything else that is available,” says Dr. Gerard Cox, a professor of medicine at McMaster University in Canada who has participated in all of Asthmatx’s clinical trials to date. “It’s not for everybody, and it’s not a cure, but it represents a remarkable advance over what we have now.”
Asthma occurs when airways in the lungs overreact to stimuli, causing airway walls to swell, excess mucus to be produced and smooth muscles that line the airway walls to narrow.
Asthmatx’s product, called the Alair System, aims to reduce the smooth muscle, which is thought to serve no useful function in the body. The company’s
treatment system, called bronchial thermoplasty, involves threading a catheter with an expandable wire basket at its tip through a patient’s nose or mouth and into the lungs via a bronchoscope. The basket is then expanded against the airway wall and thermal energy is delivered to damage the smooth muscle.
The company is now enrolling patients in AIR2, its last clinical trial, or pivotal study, before seeking approval from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to market its product. It expects to publish AIR2 data in 2008 and launch its system that same year.
In earlier trials, the device, used in conjunction with drugs and administered in three outpatient sessions of 30 minutes, has relieved asthma symptoms in patients that haven’t responded well to medications.
In the AIR1 trial, for instance, which involved 108 patients, control of asthma was improved and the patients required less medication, says Dr. Cox, who calls the results “encouraging.” The company has not published those findings yet.
“We’ve shown on multiple functions that we can take patients to a place they can’t get to with drugs alone,” says Asthmatx president and CEO Glen French. “We can significantly increase their number of symptom-free days… and we’ve seen some cases where patients can actually go off their drugs.”
Side effects have been limited to an initial sore throat and cough while infection rates have not differed between the treatment and control groups.
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