AstraZeneca lobbies for personalized asthma care with new visual snapshot tool

AstraZeneca wants asthma patients to know their treatment plans should be as unique and specific to them as a fingerprint. Its solution? Lungprint.

A new interactive digital tool, Lungprint allows asthma sufferers to generate a “customized snapshot” of their respiratory health based on their answers to a questionnaire, AZ said. And they can take those renderings right to their doctors to find out whether their asthma is under control.

“We’ve recognized and acted upon the heterogeneous nature of so many other chronic diseases; but somehow, we’ve overlooked the diversity of the asthma experience,” AZ said in a Lungprint Medium post.

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The company is rolling out the new tool against a backdrop of survey results (PDF) that indicate a majority of patients have serious concerns about their asthma and treatments.

Responding to a poll from AstraZeneca and the Asthma and Allergy Foundation of America, 65% of severe uncontrolled patients said their asthma scares them, while 64% said they couldn’t predict their asthma. Seventy-eight percent said asthma was always at the back of their mind, while 84% said asthma put at least some limitations on their everyday tasks.

If AstraZeneca gets its way, it won’t be long before the British drugmaker has a new treatment option to offer those patients. Candidate benralizumab has already been accepted by the FDA for review, and AZ expects an approval by the end of the year, company respiratory VP Tosh Butt said in a recent interview.

If benralizumab can reach the market, though, it’ll have plenty of rivals to contend with. Novartis’ Xolair, GlaxoSmithKline’s Nucala and Teva’s Cinqair are already approved for various types of severe asthma.