Hey all, welcome back to the Real Life Pharmacology podcast. I'm your host pharmacist, Eric Christensen.

Thank you so much for listening today. My voice is a little squirly today. I'm getting over a head cold,

so I apologize if I sound a little worse than usual, but wanted to stay on task and keep pumping out pharmacology education.

So as always, go check out real-life pharmacology.com.

Get your free 31-page PDF on the top 200 drugs there.

All right, we are on number 121, and that is omelizumab.

Zolair is the brand name of this medication. As you can typically

tell by the ending, if you've got that MAB, MAB ending, that is indicative of a monoclonal

antibody, which is absolutely true in this case. This medication inhibits binding of IGE to its receptors to prevent IGE-mediated reactions.

And this is probably most frequently I see this medication utilized in asthma care.

And it is going to be typically given by prescribed by specialty. So

pulmonology, for example, immunology, maybe even with asthma being one of the primary

indications, other indications that you could potentially see it used for, hives, IGE food allergies as well.

And just describing that a little bit.

So IGEE antibodies, these are proteins that are produced by your immune system,

and they're intended to help fight bacteria, viruses, anything that's basically

foreign.

And what's challenging in patients with kind of a hyper-reactive immune system, their immune

system is attacking things that in most other patients, they typically don't have to worry about reactions

to. So patients with severe allergies to, you know, molds, dust, you know, various things like

that, and severe reactions to those, what Omelizumab is going to do is help reduce basically that IGE-mediated

reaction. And the diagnosis that it's been most proven in is asthma, where it's initially

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