Immune Checkpoints as Promising Targets for the Treatment of Idiopathic Pulmonary Fibrosis?
JanWillem DuitmanTom van den EndeC Arnold SpekPublished in: Journal of clinical medicine (2019)
Idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis is a rare, progressive and fatal lung disease which affects approximately 5 million persons worldwide. Although pirfenidone and/or nintedanib treatment improves patients' wellbeing, the prognosis of IPF remains poor with 5-year mortality rates still ranging from 70 to 80%. The promise of the anti-cancer agent nintedanib in IPF, in combination with the recent notion that IPF shares several pathogenic pathways with cancer, raised hope that immune checkpoint inhibitors, the novel revolutionary anticancer agents, could also be the eagerly awaited ground-breaking and unconventional novel treatment modality limiting IPF-related morbidity/mortality. In the current review, we analyse the available literature on immune checkpoint proteins in IPF to explore whether immune checkpoint inhibition may be as promising in IPF as it is in cancer. We conclude that despite several promising papers showing that inhibiting specific immune checkpoint proteins limits pulmonary fibrosis, overall the data seem to argue against a general role of immune checkpoint inhibition in IPF and suggest that only PD-1/PD-L1 inhibition may be beneficial.
Keyphrases
- idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis
- interstitial lung disease
- papillary thyroid
- systematic review
- multiple sclerosis
- newly diagnosed
- cardiovascular events
- type diabetes
- signaling pathway
- cardiovascular disease
- squamous cell carcinoma
- machine learning
- big data
- squamous cell
- prognostic factors
- electronic health record
- combination therapy
- lymph node metastasis
- coronary artery disease
- patient reported