Nigam Shah and Purvesh Khatri, professors at Stanford University, along with graduate student Madeleine Scott have just announced results from a research study which could be pivotal for those living with idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis (IPF).
Idiopathic Pulmonary Fibrosis
IPF is a rare disease which causes scar tissue to form throughout the lungs. Eventually, this scarring prevents the lungs from expanding. Scarring is irreversible and so the only cure for IPF is a lung transplant. Unfortunately, there aren’t enough lungs available for every patient who needs one. Even worse, it’s hard to know who to prioritize for a lung transplant. This is because it’s extremely difficult for physicians to understand the severity of a patient’s IPF. Some individuals might have only one year to live past diagnosis while some may have five. But if you don’t know this right off the bat, who do you give a new lung first?
Researchers at Stanford University have discovered a biomarker which can predict which patients have the highest risk of imminent lung failure. With this new information, they’ll be able to help patients in the most critical situations receive the care they need first.
These study results were published in The Lancet Respiratory Medicine.
Researchers utilized public patient data from 7,000 individuals with IPF. They found that all of the patients with severe IPF had a high level of monocytes in their blood. A monocyte is a kind of immune cell that helps to heal wounds. As scarring is a way that the body tries to heal itself, monocytes flock to the lungs during IPF.
Researchers found that IPF patients who had 1,000 monocytes per µl of blood were twice as likely to lose their lives to the condition within two years. 1,000 was clearly a threshold in terms of acute danger. The team checked their initial findings with two more groups of patients and were able to confirm this exact number.
The best part about these findings is that the biomarker these researchers discovered can be found in a standard blood draw. Therefore, the researchers believe that tracking monocytes in the clinic will be an easy practice to implement for IPF.
You can read more about this study and how it could impact IPF patients here.