Lung scarring and improved treatment for sarcoidosis
Dr Mark Jones shares his current research project looking at how drugs that are already available may help improve treatment in people with sarcoidosis.
What is sarcoidosis?
Sarcoidosis is a condition where cells in the body can clump together and form lumps called granulomas. It affects the lungs but can also affect other areas of the body, such as lymph nodes. It affects around one in every 10,000 people in the UK. We think it may be caused by a type of inflammation, however we don’t understand a huge amount about it or what the best treatments are, so it’s a really important area of study.
How does it affect the lungs?
We think around one in five people with sarcoidosis will have their lungs affected in some way. The lumps of cells that form can cause scarring in your lungs, which can make it difficult to breathe and also changes how oxygen can get into your blood. This can be very severe and have a huge impact on your day-to-day life, and sadly for some patients it may be fatal. Unfortunately, there are currently no treatments available that are really proven to stop the scarring process over time.
Repurposing existing treatments for other conditions
Although we don’t have any treatments available for sarcoidosis scarring, we do have anti-scarring treatments for other lung conditions. Our research project is firstly trying to better understand the scarring process, looking at tissue from patients with sarcoidosis scarring in their lungs. We are also testing some of the anti-scarring treatments available for other lung conditions, two drugs called Pirfenidone and Nintedanib, to see if they are effective for sarcoidosis scarring.
New hope for sarcoidosis patients
Repurposing drugs that are already approved for other lung conditions means they could be available to patients much sooner than a brand new drug. As well as demonstrating the effectiveness of these current treatments, we want to get a better understanding of the unique aspects of sarcoidosis compared to other forms of scarring.
Our hope is that we will also get an understanding about how we could develop the next generation of treatments, which might potentially be even more effective at treating patients with scarring and sarcoidosis.
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