New drugs targeting the CFTR protein

Should we expect any new drugs targeting the CFTR protein to be available soon?

Andreas Freitag: Absolutely. It has been extraordinary in terms of seeing where we have come. Over the course of the last 6 or 7 years we have seen at least 2 products that have come to market and that are not only beyond clinical trials but actually are in clinical use, and people are being studied and followed very carefully with, I think, generally positive effects from that perspective.

But not only that. The cystic fibrosis (CF) global community has come together to take some of these medications, get them into clinical trials, to get the results very quickly over the course of maybe a year or 2 years and then hopefully through the funding agencies for approval in terms of doing that.

Even though we have got 2 medications currently that are on the market that people are using, there are lots of clinical trials that are going on at the moment, and we expect to see probably at least half a dozen new products that are going to be introduced within the next 2 or 3 years.