Researchers at UVA Health are working on a new way to detect a serious lung disease before it becomes dangerous.
The disease, called interstitial lung disease (ILD), damages the lungs over time and is one of the top reasons people need lung transplants.
The team hopes that by catching ILD early, they can help doctors develop better and safer treatments in the future.
The researchers, led by Dr. John S. Kim, have already found special signs in the blood—called biomarkers—that can help predict how long a person with ILD might survive. Now, they want to take things a step further.
They hope to use these biomarkers to find people who don’t have the disease yet but are at high risk of developing it.
They also want to understand how ILD changes over time by studying what’s happening in the body at different stages of the disease. This could lead to new ways to stop the disease before it does serious harm.
Dr. Kim explains that the biggest challenge is timing. Many people are only diagnosed after ILD has already caused major damage to their lungs. Once that happens, current treatments may not work well.
That’s why it’s important to find people at risk early, before the disease takes hold. The goal is to prevent ILD instead of just trying to slow it down after it starts.
ILD is not just one illness—it’s a group of lung conditions that cause swelling and scarring in the lungs. This makes it harder to breathe over time.
The most common type of ILD is idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis (IPF), which doctors still don’t fully understand. Some types of ILD get worse quickly, and some people may die from it. There’s no cure, and about one-third of lung transplants every year go to patients with ILD.
There are drugs that can slow the disease down, but they can come with serious side effects. Some patients can’t take them at all because they harm the liver or cause stomach problems like nausea and diarrhea. That’s why researchers are trying to find safer and more effective treatments.
In a recent study published in the American Journal of Respiratory and Critical Care Medicine, Dr. Kim and his team found several blood proteins linked to the early development of ILD.
They also discovered that some of these proteins were found in high amounts in lung tissue from people with ILD. This is a strong clue that these proteins may play a role in how the disease starts.
Thanks to a five-year grant from the National Institutes of Health, the researchers will now continue their work. They plan to test more people and gather more data to learn how these blood markers could help doctors identify at-risk patients.
In the future, these findings could allow doctors to enroll people in studies that test new treatments before symptoms begin.
Dr. Kim believes this research could be a big step forward in the fight against ILD. If doctors can combine blood biomarkers with other tools like lung scans and genetic tests, they may one day be able to prevent the disease altogether.
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The study is published in American Journal of Respiratory and Critical Care Medicine.
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