SANI-Severe Asthma Network in Italy: a way forward to monitor severe asthma

Even if severe asthma (SA) accounts for 5-10% of all cases of the disease, it is currently a crucial unmet need, owing its difficult clinical management and its high social costs. For this reason several networks, focused on SA have been organized in some countries, in order to select these patients, to recognize their clinical features, to evaluate their adherence, to classify their biological/clinical phenotypes, to identify their eligibility to the new biologic therapies and to quantify the costs of the disease. Aim of the present paper is to describe the ongoing Italian Severe Asthma Network (SANI). Up today 49 centres have been selected, widespread on the national territory. Sharing the same diagnostic protocol, data regarding patients with SA will be collected and processed in a web platform. After their recruitment, SA patients will be followed in the long term in order to investigate the natural history of the disease. Besides clinical data, the cost/benefit evaluation of the new biologics will be verified as well as the search of peculiar biomarker(s) of the disease.