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COPD: Smoking out tomorrow's therapies for emphysema and chronic bronchitis 

Globally, 600 million people suffer from emphysema or chronic obstructive bronchitis, together known as chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD). With few effective treatments, COPD represents one of the major unmet pharmaceutical markets and consequently some three million dye from the disease each year. This figure is set to increase over the next two decades leading to analysts to suggest that COPD will be the 5th most common cause of death by 2020 To address the growing need to develop improved treatments of COPD, LeadDiscovery, the drug discovery, development and transfer consultants, have collaborated with Professor Peter Barnes, the field leader in the area of airway disease to produce a key state of the art analysis of COPD, over-viewing current treatment strategies, critically assessing new therapeutic targets, and suggesting experimental models and screening architectures most likely to allow these targets to be exploited.

Despite being a major killer, many people view COPD as "self-inflicted" with smoking being one of the major causes of COPD. Hence public opinion has maybe forced research funding towards other diseases. According to one of the study authors, Dr Jon Goldhill "this does not appear to be the real reason for lack of progress in COPD. There are many examples of therapeutic progress in so called "self-inflicted" diseases. Furthermore, the human and economic cost of COPD is massive and this is matched by an equally large global market for COPD treatments, estimated to be as much as US$2.8 billion each year. These figures firmly suggest that the financial driving force exists to push the field of COPD therapeutics forwards".

So what is the reason for the inertia surrounding COPD?

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