Last April, COVID-19 took up residence in our house again — or so we thought. My husband, Jonny, had a raging set of symptoms, and I had a sore throat. Our at-home tests gave mixed results. After a week of quarantining, our PCR tests came back negative. Negative?…
Have you ever experienced a period in your life when nothing seemed to go right? While that may seem an odd question for those in the rare disease community, in my case, sadly, it’s not rhetorical. June has altered some of the best-laid plans, and that trend has flowed into…
Treatment with a molecule designed to activate the SHP-1 protein led to prolonged survival and alleviation of disease-associated lung changes in a mouse model of idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis (IPF), a study found. SHP-1 activation appeared to exert its protective effects by inhibiting the survival and pro-fibrotic activity of a…
Ofev (nintedanib) more than halved the rate of lung function decline in patients who developed interstitial lung disease (ILD) associated with rheumatoid arthritis (RA), an inflammatory disease. That’s according to data from INBUILD (NCT02999178), a Phase 3 trial of more than 650 adults with progressive fibrosing ILDs in…
July is a month of celebration at our house. Though it begins with the Fourth of July, my personal “Independence Day” is on July 10 — the day I received a double-lung transplant in 2021. It’s a celebration tempered with reverence for the beautiful lungs my donor gifted me.
A Phase 3 trial of pamrevlumab, an experimental therapy from FibroGen to treat idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis (IPF), failed to meet its primary goal of slowing lung function decline. General safety and tolerability were seen in treated patients in ZEPHYRUS-1 (NCT03955146), which tested 48 weeks of pamrevlumab’s use…
Insilico Medicine made its entry into Phase 2 clinical testing with INS018_055, a small molecule it discovered and designed using artificial intelligence (AI), as a potential treatment for idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis (IPF). Patients have now received the first dose of oral INS018_055 in a randomized placebo-controlled Phase 2…
Adversity is something rare disease patients face on a regular basis. It can take many forms, but it often involves facing a challenging situation or doing something against all odds. When I was diagnosed with idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis (IPF) in January 2017, I don’t think I had any…
A new, potentially disease-specific imaging agent may one day allow doctors to identify pulmonary fibrosis (PF) in earlier stages, when the start of treatment can be more effective, according to a study in a mouse model of the disease. Called 64Cu-GPVI-Fc, the agent — coupled with positron emission tomography…
Researchers in the U.S. turned a special type of mouse stem cell into green, glowing lung cells in the lab and now have a limitless supply they can use as a model to study how pulmonary fibrosis and other lung diseases develop. “Our study has implications for the study…
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