Brensocatib Could Change the Landscape of Bronchiectasis Treatment: James Chalmers, MD

James Chalmers, MD, chair of respiratory research, Cardiology, at the University of Dundee, Scotland, discussed how brensocatib would alter the way that clinicians treat bronchiectasis should it be approved for general use.

This transcript has been lightly edited for clarity; captions are auto-generated.

Transcript

How would the approval of brensocatib change the landscape of bronchiectasis?

If approved, this would be the first licensed treatment for bronchiectasis. This would be a major landmark in the management of patients with bronchiectasis. This is a disease with no effective treatments currently licensed, and with a huge unmet need. We've shown that brensocatib can reduce exacerbations and slow down the progression of the disease. That's incredibly exciting for patients. I talk to patients and they see real potential benefits with this treatment, and so it will be a major moment for people with bronchiectasis to finally have an approved, effective therapy.

What it will also do, I think, is change our mindsets a little bit. I said at the beginning that patients are often treated with repeated courses of antibiotics, what this treatment shows is that this is an inflammatory disease, and we can target the inflammation, and if we start to think about inflammation as the target, it may reduce our reliance on antibiotics and allow us to think more about how do we prevent our patients from getting worse over time? And finally, I think that the availability of an effective therapy puts a responsibility on us as clinicians to find those patients with bronchiectasis that are currently undiagnosed or misdiagnosed, which we know is a really big problem. Because it doesn't matter how good a treatment is, it's not effective if it can't reach patients. This is a moment, I think, for us as a scientific in a medical community to think, how do we improve diagnosis and care pathways for people with bronchiectasis?