Multimodal smart imaging of critical inflammatory processes in murine models of pulmonary fibrosis

Model systems that exist today may not accurately reflect what is actually going on in human disease. One crucial problem is that we have been unable to visualise molecular events within animal models and humans until cutting edge technology has been launched. We wish to improve the treatment of a condition called idiopathic pulmonary (lung) fibrosis. This condition has a worse mortality than most cancers and there are currently no effective drug treatments. The fibrotic (scarring) process in pulmonary fibrosis is similar to that in other parts of the body such as liver and kidney. This research will apply cutting edge imaging to discover what key mechanisms are being switched on and off at different stages of the disease process. Extrapolating this to human disease is of utmost importance and will lead to new targeted therapies for inflammatory/scarring conditions of the lung and other organs.

Idiopathic Pulmonary fibrosis (IPF) is a devastating inflammatory/scarring disease of the lungs. It is associated with a median survival of 3 years, and no current drug interventions have shown any clinical benefit. Part of the problem in new drug development for this and other inflammatory/scarring diseases of the lungs, and other organs, is the relatively slow progress of the disease and the lack of good, meaningful biomarkers. Thus there is a pressing need for improved animal models of these diseases in order to better understand the links between inflammation and tissue destruction/scarring, develop incisive biomarkers that can readily be translated into humans and more rapidly generate, and assess, novel mechanism-based drug treatments. A fundamental problem with existing animal models is that none of the underlying pathogenic processes have been properly validated in situ. We propose to address this by applying cutting-edge mutimodality optical and positron emission tomographic imaging to established models of murine pulmonary fibrosis in a fashion which will validate PET and other imaging techniques for application in human disease and then evaluate interventions that may be of clinical benefit.