AstraZeneca India, a science-led biopharmaceutical company, is advancing its commitment to chronic respiratory care by extending its successful Centre of Excellence (COE) concept. This concept originally developed for severe asthma, to the management of Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease (COPD).
The COE initiative is extended to AERO (Airway Alliance for Excellence in Respiratory Outcomes) Clinics, have established centres in Delhi, Bangalore, Hyderabad, Kerala, Chennai, Goa, and Mohali. These centres will serve as pivotal hubs for expanding nationwide access to patient education, diagnosis, and advanced treatment pathways.
COPD remains a major global health challenge, ranking as the fourth leading cause of death worldwide and responsible for 3.5 million deaths in 2021- approximately 5% of all global fatalities. Notably, nearly 90% of COPD deaths in people under 70 occur in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs), including India. The disease’s burden is projected to rise, with deaths in India expected to exceed 79.13 per lakh population by 2030, unless intervention strategies are accelerated. Yet, with effective management and public health measures, this figure could potentially decrease to below 60.55 per lakh population, highlighting the impact of improved care.
Despite these concerning trends, COPD remains underdiagnosed and underprioritized in India. The country ranks last on the global COPD Index for access to care, diagnostics, and policies supporting environmental health [4]. Public awareness is limited, and many patients experience delayed diagnosis and fragmented treatment approaches.
Current management of COPD in India faces multiple critical gaps, including limited access to spirometry and diagnostic tools, shortages in trained personnel, insufficient training, especially in rural regions, and the lack of context-specific guidelines and local epidemiological data. Pulmonary rehabilitation and adult vaccination services are scarce, and the adoption of recent therapeutic advances is restrained, meaning many patients do not receive optimal treatments.
Commenting on the initiative, Dr Sandeep Arora, Director Medical Affairs, AstraZeneca Pharma India Ltd., said: “COPD has too often been overlooked in India. Behind every breathless climb of stairs is a family coping with a progressive lung disease driven by largely preventable exposures, smoking, ambient air pollution in many cities, and polluting cooking fuels such as wood, dung, or coal. Because lung damage in COPD is often irreversible, earlier intervention, proactive care, and adherence to evidence-based guidelines are essential. Accurate diagnosis with quality-assured spirometry, combined with patient education, correct inhaler technique, smoking-cessation support, influenza and pneumococcal vaccination, and timely access to care can reduce flare-ups and hospitalisations and help people live more fully. With our Centres of Excellence and Aero Clinics, we aim to drive earlier identification and transform COPD care nationwide. Meeting this urgent need requires a unified health-system response so that wherever someone seeks help, they receive reliable, high-quality, evidence-based, guideline-aligned COPD management across the country.”
Nine Centres of Excellence are currently operational nationwide. COEs provide expert mentorship and regular training sessions to AERO clinics, supporting them with standardised protocols and updates. Through this collaborative model, clinics present complex cases to COEs, fostering continuous knowledge exchange and building clinical expertise. This approach enables local healthcare providers, including those in underserved regions across India, to deliver consistent, high-quality COPD care.
Reinforcing the model’s patient-centric rigor, Dr. Lancelot Pinto, pulmonologist practicing in Mumbai says “A Centre of Excellence involves precision medicine. It involves tailoring treatment to individual needs based on a thorough assessment of a patient. The Centre of Excellence for Airway Diseases at Hinduja Hospital has allowed us to offer the best available care to patients with severe asthma and COPD. There are checklists in place to look at not just the disease but also contributory factors that may warrant a multi-disciplinary approach. As a result of such a thorough assessment, there is an aspiration to excel at both patient satisfaction and quality of care. Such specialized and tailored care are the need of the hour and is the future of a patient-focused approach.”
Highlighting the COE framework’s structured decision-making, Dr. Rajesh V practicing in Kochi adds “The Centre of Excellence is the need of the hour in the management of severe asthma. These COEs allow us time to identify the correctable factors in uncontrolled asthma, identify the true severe asthmatics, identify the need for biologics and spend time with patients to discuss outcome prediction and realistic expectations of benefits. Furthermore, after initiation, we get time to evaluate the patients in a reasonably objective manner with regards to the results of biologics therapy in severe asthma.”
By embedding clinical excellence and accessibility into its COPD care framework, AstraZeneca’s AERO Clinics and Centres of Excellence offer a scalable, sustainable solution to reduce the COPD burden in India and elevate standards of care nationwide.
This COE expansion sounds promising, but I’m wondering—how will these clinics ensure early COPD detection in rural areas where spirometry access is still very limited?