Yet a Glaxo study in 2004 found that 60% of asthma patients could control their disease with just the inhaled steroid Flovent, the other half of Advair.

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The purple puck delivers a blast of two Glaxo medicines that won approval years before: Serevent, a "beta agonist" that was cleared in England in 1990 and in the U.S. in 1994, and Flovent, an inhaled steroid that won U.S. approval in 1996.

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Genentech and Novartis initially plan to aim Xolair at 500, 000 or so moderate-to-severe asthmatics whose condition isn't controlled even with high doses of existing drugs, such as GlaxoSmithKline 's (nyse: GSK - news - people ) inhaled steroid Flovent or Merck 's (nyse: MRK - news - people ) Singulair, a so-called leukotriene inhibitor.

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