Dr Leda Mannent Discusses Treatment Options With Rilzabrutinib for Moderate to Severe Asthma

Patients treated with rilzabrutinib experienced rapid symptom improvement and reduced loss of asthma control even after withdrawing inhaled corticosteroids and a controller, says Leda Mannent, MD, global project head, Immunology and Inflammation, Sanofi.

The findings from the double-blind placebo-controlled phase 2 study were presented at the American Thoracic Society (ATS) 2024 International Conference.

Transcript

How do you envision rilzabrutinib will impact real-world patient management and potentially reduce the health care burden?

There are 2 key burdens for the health care system and for the patients today, and there are 2 major concerns. These are reducing the symptom burden and also preventing exacerbation. Despite the advent of biologics and many available therapies, there are more than 50% of the patients to day who still have uncontrolled symptoms. They carry on with their symptoms every day; they have wheeze, they have shortness of breath, they have cough, and they cannot manage their day-to-day living.

Therefore, there is a really high unmet need, despite current available therapies, to have something else. An advanced oral therapy would give these patients an additional option, but also [enable] the prescribers to reduce the symptom burden, and also to prevent the exacerbation. The result of this first rilzabrutinib study shows that rilzabrutinib has the potential to reduce the symptoms and reduce the loss of asthma control, which may predict future reduction in exacerbations.

How do you see rilzabrutinib fitting into existing treatment regimens for moderate to severe asthma, and is there potential for combination therapy with inhaled corticosteroids or other biologics?

As previously mentioned, more than 50% of patients remain uncontrolled despite being on inhaled corticosteroids, having other controlled therapy, or having biologics. So, these patients need additional options. In our study, we evaluated rilzabrutinib on top of inhaled corticosteroids and LABA [long-acting β-agonists], which is a controller, for the first 4 weeks. After, we withdrew their therapy, so we were able to evaluate in this first exploratory study the efficacy of rilzabrutinib [in improvement] in symptoms and the loss of asthma control while they were on inhaled corticosteroids and a controller, but also when they withdrew.

The study indicates that rilzabrutinib has potential to improve symptoms on top of inhaled corticosteroids and LABA, but also the symptoms continued to improve despite the withdrawal. As we are moving forward—we just got this data—we are exploring all the opportunities of rilzabrutinib in the future. However, the data really provide us very good insight as we build the new studies.