Current Perspectives on Biological Therapy for COPD

Abstract

Chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) is a chronic, complex, and heterogeneous condition with significant mortality, morbidity, and socioeconomic burden. Given the heterogeneity, the current management of COPD, which mainly relies on bronchodilators and corticosteroids, cannot consider all COPD populations. Moreover, the present treatment modalities are directed at minimizing symptoms and reducing the risk of a future attack, but they exhibit few meaningful anti-inflammatory activities in preventing and reducing disease progression. Therefore, new anti-inflammatory molecules are needed to manage COPD better. Use of targeted biotherapy may obtain better results by increasing understanding of the underlying inflammatory process and identifying new biomarkers. In this review, we focus briefly on study of the underlying inflammatory process in the pathogenesis of COPD for better identification of novel target biomarkers, and we describe a novel class of anti-inflammatory biologics that are already under evaluation for their use in managing COPD.

Keywords:

• COPD
• biologics
• management
• new therapies
• anti-inflammatory

Additional information

Funding

This study was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (No. 82270114 and 82070102), the Project of Science and Technology Commission of Shanghai Municipality (No. 22Y11901300, 21Y11901400 and 20ZR1451500), the Program of Shanghai Academic Research Leader (No. 22XD1422700), the Fund of Shanghai Youth Talent Support Program.