# New Therapies Show Promise for Fibrotic Diseases
Researchers have made key breakthroughs in understanding how to treat fibrotic diseases such as scleroderma and graft-versus-host disease.
Fibrotic diseases are a group of conditions-frequently enough autoimmune-characterized by excessive tissue scarring. They can drastically hinder patients’ quality of life, and in some cases, they can be life-threatening-fibrosis contributes to approximately 45% of all deaths in developed nations. However, there are no effective treatments.Now, in a study in Blood, researchers have developed a monoclonal antibody that is showing promise as a new therapy for patients.
And in a Nature Communications study, the same team discovered a signaling pathway that might potentially be mediating fibrosis and could be a target for future therapies.
“Treatments for fibrosis are an enormously unmet need,” says Richard Flavell, a professor of immunobiology at Yale School of Medicine (YSM) and co-principal investigator of the studies. “Better understanding these conditions will likely yield new medicines to help patients.”
Previous research has linked the upregulation of a protein called epidermal growth factor receptor (EGFR)-which helps control how cells grow and multiply-with fibrotic diseases. Typically, this protein helps promote wound healing. But when it becomes overactivated, it can produce excessive scar tissue associated with fibrosis.
In 2022, the YSM researchers found that skin samples from patients with scleroderma-a rare autoimmune disease that causes fibrosis of the skin and sometiems internal organs-had increased levels of epiregulin, a signaling molecule that binds to EGFR. They hypothesized that more epiregulin could be driving the overactivation of EGFR, leading to fibrosis in scleroderma. To test this idea, they used an antibody to target and reduce epiregulin in animal models and found that it reversed fibrosis.
Based on these findings, in their latest study, the team developed a new human anti-epiregulin therapeutic antibody and tested its ability to mitigate graft-versus-host-disease, a complication of stem cell or bone marrow transplants in which donor immune cells attack the body and, in some
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