Asthma Therapeutics: Recent Strides, New Hurdles

The traditional view of asthma, shown here in a simplified version, has become vastly more detailed over the past decade, and a great many pathways of cell differentiation and signal transduction that modulate asthma have been identified, particularly with the use of mouse models. But as nineteenth-century physiologist Claude Bernard observed, it is sometimes “what we think we know that keeps us from learning.” New successes in asthma therapeutics (left), built upon “what we know,” appear to address only certain patient types. The ongoing need for new asthma therapeutics may require researchers to broaden the types of questions and metrics used in clinical development. (See text for details.)