It might start with a shortness of breath that’s easily dismissed as getting older or needing more exercise. But for the nearly 3 million patients with idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis (IPF), this subtle symptom rapidly worsens into a suffocating inability to breathe, often leading to a dangerous elevation in pulmonary artery pressure, related heart attacks or fatal respiratory failure within three to five years of diagnosis. USC physician-scientists Denis Evseenko and Toby Maher hope to offer these patients a better prognosis by developing a regenerative drug to block the cells that promote fibrosis, or scarring, in the lungs, with support from a five-year $3.2 million grant from the National Institute on Aging, part of the National Institutes of Health (NIH).
The IPF project will define one of the major research directions of the USC Parris Longevity Accelerator, led by Evseenko and founded with a $10 million gift from R. Rex and Carrol Parris to find treatments for age-related conditions, ranging from heart disease to neurodegeneration to osteoarthritis to IPF.