Jeffrey Koenitzer, MD, PhD

Research Project:
Lung Protein May be Treatment Target for Pulmonary Fibrosis

Grant Awarded:

Catalyst Award

Research Topics:

basic biologic mechanisms
biomarkers
computational biology

Research Diseases:

interstitial lung disease
pulmonary fibrosis

The formation of scar tissue is a normal part of the body's response to injury. However, in the lung there are diseases in which this scarring is uncontrolled and leads to replacement of normal lung with scar tissue, called pulmonary fibrosis. In severe forms this leads to death or lung transplant within a few years. A protein from the lung found circulating in blood, called LTBP2, has been recently found to predict how quickly lung disease will progress in patients with pulmonary fibrosis. This is potentially helpful for patients and their physicians, but it would be most useful if the specific role of LTBP2 in lung fibrosis was known. We will identify the relationship between LTBP2 in blood from patients with lung fibrosis taken before they received a lung transplant, and the levels and activity of LTBP2 in diseased lungs removed from those patients during the transplant. If a relationship can be shown, it may allow us to target LTBP2 as treatment in patients with elevated blood levels. Additional studies will be performed to uncover how LTBP2 impacts the development of lung scarring.

Catalyst Award, applied under the Dalsemer Award

Page last updated: October 11, 2024

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