Emergence of Precision Pharmacotherapy in Sleep Apnea: Danny Eckert, PhD

WATCH TIME: 3 minutes

"About 70% of people with sleep apnea have one or more non-anatomical traits driving their condition, and now we can finally start tailoring treatments to those traits rather than just the anatomy."

Obstructive sleep apnea (OSA) is the most common form of sleep apnea and affects an estimated 936 million people globally, according to a 2019 Lancet Respiratory Medicine study. In the United States, moderate-to-severe OSA is estimated to affect 10% to 30% of adults, with higher rates in men, older individuals, and those with obesity. For years, pharmacotherapy for OSA has been limited, with positive airway pressure devices remaining the standard of care; however, recent years have seen meaningful progress in drug development targeting underlying pathophysiologic mechanisms of OSA.

The topic of pharmacotherapy in sleep apnea was brought up in presentation at the 2025 SLEEP Annual Meeting, held June 8-11, in Seattle, Washington, by expert Danny Eckert, PhD. Eckert, director of sleep health at Flinders University in Adelaide, Australia, provided the latest insights in the development of treatments for OSA, covering repurposed and emerging agents, as well as the potential for combination approaches that involve the use of non-CPAP device-based therapies and/or interventions that target non-anatomical causes of OSA.

During the meeting, Eckert sat down with NeurologyLive^® to explain the premise behind his presentation, and how recent advances in discovery science have enabled a more personalized, precision medicine approach to OSA. Eckert, who also serves as a part-time lead investigator at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, in Boston, Massachusetts, spoke on the 3 key non-anatomical traits–muscle responsiveness, respiratory control instability, and arousal threshold sensitivity–that contribute to the disorder in approximately 70% of patients. Furthermore, he highlighted how clinical research is increasingly targeting these traits with novel therapeutics and combination strategies, aiming to address the heterogeneity of OSA.

Click here for more SLEEP 2025 coverage.