ALK has announced that for the first time, allergy immunotherapy is now recommended as a treatment option in the Global Initiative for Asthma (GINA) report: Global Strategy for Asthma Management and Prevention.
This global strategy is a practical resource developed to guide healthcare professionals and policy makers, and represents the latest clinical evidence and medical practice for the treatment and management of asthma. The strategy is updated annually based on review of recent scientific literature by an international panel of experts on the GINA Science Committee.
The 2017 update, which includes new information regarding the use of allergy immunotherapy, has just been released and features the following addition to steps 3 and 4 of GINA’s recommended stepwise treatment of asthma in adult house dust mite (HDM) sensitive patients: “Consider adding SLIT (sublingual allergy immunotherapy) in adult HDM sensitive patients with allergic rhinitis who have exacerbations despite ICS (inhaled corticosteroids), provided FEV1 is > 70% of predicted lung function. This change draws upon recently published results from ALK’s Phase III clinical trial evaluating the treatment of HDM allergic asthma with the HDM SLIT-tablet, ACARIZAX in The Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA)”
“We are extremely pleased to see the recognition of ACARIZAX® clinical evidence in the management of asthma. This confirms our long-held conviction that allergy immunotherapy has an important role to play in the treatment of allergic asthma, a belief confirmed by the unprecedented clinical development programme for ACARIZAX®, currently the only HDM SLIT-tablet indicated for use in patients with house dust mite allergic asthma that is not well controlled,” says Henrik Jacobi, Executive Vice President of Research & Development at ALK. “ALK is committed to gathering further evidence to support the wider recognition of allergy immunotherapy as a treatment option for asthma, and to investigating the potential role for allergy immunotherapy in preventing the onset of asthma.”
“This is very encouraging. I am pleased to see findings from this important trial translated into clinical guidelines. This underlines the importance of performing robust evidence based trials in allergy immunotherapy,” says Professor J. Christian Virchow, of the University of Rostock and lead author of the recently published paper in JAMA.
ACARIZAX is currently approved for the treatment in HDM allergic asthma in 12 European countries and Australia.
