Targeting patients with asthma for omalizumab therapy: choosing the right patient to get the best value for money

Abstract

The asthma syndrome has many manifestations, termed phenotypes, that arise by specific cellular and molecular mechanisms, termed endotypes. Understanding an individual’s asthma phenotype helps clinicians make rational therapeutic decisions while the understanding of endotypes has led to the development of specific precision medications. Allergic asthma is an example of an asthma phenotype and omalizumab, a monoclonal antibody that neutralizes serum immunoglobulin (Ig)E, is a specific targeted treatment which was developed as a result of an understanding of the endotype of allergic asthma. Omalizumab has been widely used in clinical practice in Europe for over a decade as an add-on therapy to treat patients who have severe refractory allergic asthma. Over this period, many centres have reported their experience with omalizumab as an add-on therapy in patients with severe asthma. These ‘real world’ clinical effectiveness studies have confirmed the benefits, cost-effectiveness and clinical utility of this medication. Combining the outcomes of both sources of research has yielded important insights that may benefit patients with severe asthma, clinicians who treat them, as well as the funding agencies that reimburse the cost of this medication. The purpose of this review is to describe how to identify and evaluate a patient with asthma for whom treatment with omalizumab may be of clinical and cost-effective benefit. The assessment and investigations used to confirm allergic asthma, the objective assessment of adherence to asthma therapy and the expected benefits of add-on omalizumab treatment are described.