Top 2 Key Takeaways from ACAAI 2018

Severe asthma and peanut allergy. If Payel Gupta, MD, had to boil down the wealth of insights she gleaned from this year’s annual meeting of the American College of Allergy, Asthma and Immunology (ACAAI) in Seattle, she’d showcase the new therapeutic options that are changing (and are soon to change) the face of treatment for patients with those 2 conditions.

Payel Gupta, MD, allergist and immunologist, ENT & Allergy Associates, national spokesperson for the American Lung Association:

I think that there are 2 topics that resonated throughout the conference. The first one I'd say would be asthma and where we've come in asthma treatment options over the last 20 or 25 years.

We've gone from using oral steroids to inhaled steroids to inhaled steroids with a combination of long acting beta agonists, to now having these biologics that are out there that we can use to really tailor treatment based on what our asthma patients' profile is.

I think that is super exciting for us as allergists and asthma specialists. It's going to give us options for those severe asthmatics that didn't really have options before who were on chronic steroids, oral steroids for forever, which can lead to so many different negative consequences. We're excited about having different treatment options for these patients and being able to tailor therapy.

The second theme that I think people are really excited about is the new desensitization options that are going to become available in 2019. We hope! One of them is a peanut desensitization patch, and the second one is a powder base oral immunotherapy for peanuts also.

That's super exciting because right now all we have is avoidance measures for our patients. to be able to offer something else to patients is going to be a game changer.

There are physicians out there that are doing oral immunotherapy in their offices but it's not really standardized, it's not FDA approved and not all allergists feel comfortable doing that. So with 2 treatment options that are actually FDA approved, we're going to be more comfortable and I think that patients are just going to have more options and feel safer.