Geoffrey Pointing says its hard to describe the distress of an asthma or COPD flare-up.

“Honestly, when you’re having a flare up, it’s very difficult to tell anybody how you feel – you can hardly breathe,” Pointing, 77, of Banbury, England, said in a news release. 

But an existing injectable drug might make these attacks much less frightening, a new clinical trial has shown.

The already-approved drug for asthma could replace steroid medications as a means of quelling asthma and COPD flare-ups, researchers report.

Benralizabam, a monoclonal antibody, did a better job than steroids at reducing respiratory symptoms like coughing, wheezing, breathlessness and hacking up phlegm, according to trial results published in The Lancet Respiratory Medicine.

After three months of treatment, four times fewer people taking benralizumab had suffered an asthma or COPD attack, compared to people taking the steroid prednisolone.

“This could be a game-changer for people with asthma and COPD,” said lead researcher Dr. Mona Bafadhel, chair of respiratory medicine for King’s College London.

“Treatment for asthma and COPD exacerbations have not changed in fifty years despite causing 3.8 million deaths worldwide a year combined,” Bafadhel continued in a news release. “Benralizumab is a safe and effective drug already used to manage severe asthma. We’ve used the drug in a different way — at the point of an exacerbation — to show that it’s more effective than steroid tablets, which is the only treatment currently available.”

Pointing, who participated in the trial, called the drug “fantastic.”

“I didn’t get any side effects like I used to with the steroid tablets,” he said. “I used to never sleep well the first night of taking steroids, but the first day on the study, I could sleep that first night, and I was able to carry on with my life without problems.”

Benralizumab targets specific white blood cells called eosinophils, which contribute to lung inflammation.

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved it in 2017 for the management of severe asthma, but this trial aimed to test its effectiveness in dealing with asthma and COPD attacks.

Eosinophilic exacerbations make up 30% of COPD flare-ups and nearly 50% of asthma attacks, researchers said. During these episodes, amounts of the white blood cells surge in the lungs, causing wheezing, coughing and chest tightness.

For the clinical trial, researchers divided asthma or COPD patients into one of three groups – one receiving benralizumab during a flare-up, another taking prednisolone tablets, and a third receiving both benralizumab and prednisolone.

The benralizumab group not only had fewer symptoms, but it also took longer for them to suffer an event so severe they had to either see a doctor or go to the hospital, researchers found.

People given the injections also had an overall improvement in their quality of life, researchers added.

The injections were administered by health care professionals during the trial, but could potentially be given safely at home or in a doctor’s office, researchers said.

“Our study shows massive promise for asthma and COPD treatment,” lead researcher Dr. Sanjay Ramakrishnan, a clinical senior lecturer at the University of Western Australia, said in a news release. “COPD is the third leading cause of death worldwide but treatment for the condition is stuck in the 20th century. We need to provide these patients with life-saving options before their time runs out.”

The clinical trial was supported by benralizumab’s manufacturer, AstraZeneca.

More information

The Mayo Clinic has more on benralizumab.

SOURCE: King’s College London, news release, Nov. 27, 2024

Source: HealthDay