The inadequate benefits of the existing therapies and the new insights into the pathophysiology of inflammatory airway diseases like chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) and asthma have led to the breakthrough of newer targets and innovative compounds as the treatment alternatives. The enhanced interpretation of immune cell signalling and signal transduction pathways at the molecular level involved in this process allows the selection of new therapeutic targets and designing of new molecules to combat such multifactorial diseases. Pertaining to the marked variability in type of inflammation observed in their disease phenotypes, the blockade of a particular receptor or mediator yielding strong restorative effect in one patient may not be significant to other. Therefore, their management requires the prompt and phenotype specific optimized drug therapies and development of new and improved molecular compounds targeting the immune cell signalling. This whole process including the approval of such compounds as the standard drug therapies is time taking, expensive and complicated task. It ranges from the selection of novel anti-inflammatory drug target to the final approval of biologically active restorative molecules. Grounded on this, the current review gives a comprehensive idea of the basic immunological network involved in these inflammatory airway diseases at the cellular level along with the discussion of their potential therapeutic targets. It also follows brief over viewing of the drug development process generally employed for the exploration of such innovative targets leading to the discovery of novel anti-inflammatory molecules for these inflammatory airway diseases.
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