A pill to replace inhalers could soon find its way to your medicine cabinet, as scientists at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee are working to make an asthma pill a reality.
"Rather than having a child go to school with an inhaler in their bag and they don't use it, if perhaps there is a pill taken in the morning or the evening that controls their symptoms we think that's a much better way, more reliable and compliant way, to treat the disease," said Dr. Doug Stafford, director of the Milwaukee Institute for Drug Discovery at UWM.
Stafford added that asthma is especially bad in Milwaukee.
"The prevalence of asthma is almost twice that of the nation," Stafford said.
UWM Associate Professor of Chemistry and Biochemistry Alexander Arnold explained how the pill is designed to treat multiple symptoms of asthma.
"We can actually treat multiple symptoms of asthma, which is muscle constriction, which is inflammation and thirdly which is mucus production," Arnold said.
With help from multiple universities and a grant from the National Institutes of Health, UWM researchers are making progress.
"We have a lot of research which are done with laboratory animals because they are a very good model in order to find compounds, which are active in a live organism," Arnold said.
The pill also doesn't have steroids like inhaler medications.
"In doing that we can also avoid the use of steroids, which are part of those inhaler medications that not only can cause side effects, but also in many patients they're resistant to the steroid effects," Stafford said.
Researchers said the pill would be cheap and convenient. It should be ready for humans in the next five to 10 years.
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