The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has approved the use of mepolizumab to treat severe asthma in children as young as 6 years.
Mepolizumab (GlaxoSmithKline’s Nucala) is an add-on maintenance treatment to help decrease airway inflammation in patients with severe eosinophilic asthma, which afflicts about 9,000 children in the U.S.
The treatment has been approved as a 40-milligram (mg) dose injection for children ages 6-11 and is the only biologic approved for this age group to treat severe asthma. In 2015, it was licensed for patients 12 and older as a 100-mg dose. Trials have found it its safety profile to be similar to that of older children.
Full prescribing information is available at http://bit.ly/2kL8RtJ.
