Therapy for Fibrotic Diseases: Nearing the Starting Line

Fibrosis, or the accumulation of extracellular matrix molecules that make up scar tissue, is a common feature of chronic tissue injury. Pulmonary fibrosis, renal fibrosis, and hepatic cirrhosis are among the more common fibrotic diseases, which in aggregate represent a huge unmet clinical need. New appreciation of the common features of fibrosis that are conserved among tissues has led to a clearer understanding of how epithelial injury provokes dysregulation of cell differentiation, signaling, and protein secretion. At the same time, discovery of tissue-specific features of fibrogenesis, combined with insights about genetic regulation of fibrosis, has laid the groundwork for biomarker discovery and…