A maintenance drug, Cinqair, can be used with other asthma medicines to treat adults with severe asthma, announced the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). The new drug will be used for the maintenance treatment of people with a history of severe asthma attacks, the federal agency said.

Asthma is a chronic medical condition that makes breathing difficult by narrowing the air passage. It causes symptoms such as wheezing, coughing and chest tightness. A sufferer of severe asthma attacks may visit hospital’s emergency room because the condition is serious and deadly.

A 2013 report of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) suggested that over 22 million Americans have been living with asthma, and more than 400,000 asthma-related hospitalizations have been reported every year.

“Health care providers and their patients with severe asthma now have another treatment option to consider when the disease is not well controlled by their current asthma therapies”, said Badrul Chowdhury, the director of the Division of Pulmonary, Allergy, and Rheumatology Products in the FDA’s Center for Drug Evaluation and Research.

Cinqair (reslizumab) is administered once every month by intravenous (IV) infusion with a dose of 3 mg/kg. Teva Pharmaceutical Industries Ltd. expects that the drug will be available to patients during the second quarter of the year.

The drug could help a patient by reducing the levels of blood eosinophils, as per the FDA. The approval of the drug by the federal agency is an important advancement to treat the disease as it has provided significant improvement in multiple measures of asthma control, said Mario Castro, lead investigator of the drug and a professor at Washington University School of Medicine, Division of Pulmonary and Critical Care Medicine.