Barriers to new drug development in respiratory disease

Despite enormous unmet medical needs in respiratory medicine, very few new classes of safe and effective therapy have been introduced over the past 40 years. In spite of its enormous burden, respiratory medicine appears to have fewer new approved therapies than other common disease areas, such as cardiovascular, metabolic and neurological diseases, with fewer drug candidates and a higher failure rate. Furthermore, as in other areas of drug discovery, the time for drug development is getting longer and the risk of failure ever higher, leading to enormous and growing development costs. In order to identify some of the barriers to drug discovery in respiratory medicine, a European Respiratory Society Presidential Summit was held on July 2-3, 2014, in Rome, Italy. This meeting brought together respiratory scientists, clinicians, regulators, clinical pharmacologists and the pharmaceutical industry from across Europe to explore how these barriers might be overcome to facilitate the future development of new and effective therapies for respiratory diseases. This editorial highlights some of the opportunities for improving respiratory drug development that were discussed at the 2014 European Respiratory Society Presidential Summit. These include the development of more predictive preclinical disease models, the regulatory framework needed for better respiratory drug development, and how Germany is hoping to address the issues discussed above through a recently established national centre for lung research.