A New Strategy in the Fight Against Fibrosis

COVID-19 and pulmonary fibrosis have a lot in common. Both can attack the delicate tissues in the lungs, making breathing progressively difficult, and both can be potentially life-threatening. The novel coronavirus has even been known to cause fibrosis. But even though a slate of COVID-19 vaccines has recently been approved, pulmonary fibrosis still has no cure, and the majority of drugs designed to treat it have failed clinical trials.

A new research project at the University at Buffalo may finally change that reality and open the door to viable interventions.

The development of anti-pulmonary-fibrosis drugs has been stymied by the slow progression of the disease, the high cost of trials and the current limitations of preclinical models to study the role of inflammation, which is one of the major contributors to the disease.

That could soon change thanks to a new research project led by Ruogang Zhao, associate professor of biomedical engineering at UB. Working with a $920,000 grant from the National Institutes of Health, Zhao and his team are developing a new model to study inflammation-induced fibrosis in order to better understand its causes and evaluate potential drug candidates.

The researchers’ new model relies on microfabrication to create microtissues, 3D patterns that are about the same diameter as a single human hair. Arrayed together, these bioengineered tissues can be used to study how inflammation induces fibrosis and to detect changes in the tissue stiffness, which is closely related to disease progression or reversal under drug treatment. If successful, the model could be an effective alternative to animal and clinical models for fibrosis drug tests, and could also contribute to the battle against COVID-19.

“We hope that our work will expedite the translation of drug candidates from the laboratory to clinics,” says Zhao, noting that lung diseases have been somewhat overlooked in the past. “The lung is extremely susceptible to environmental factors. The COVID-19 pandemic taught us this lesson. But compared to well-studied areas such as cancer and cardiovascular diseases, lung diseases are understudied.”