Claudia Loebel, MD, PhD

Pulmonary fibrosis (PF) is a progressive disease in which a patient’s lungs are scarred, often for unknown reasons. Over time, the scarred tissue prevents oxygen from being taken up by the blood, leading to shortness of breath and often death. There is currently no cure for PF. Thus, there is a critical need to better understand PF and identify new therapeutic targets. Tissue stiffness due to scarring and accumulation of abnormal cells are characteristic for lungs with PF. Current cell culture systems this involve plastic, which does not mimic the environment inside the body. To address this problem, we have developed biomaterial-based culture systems to study the response of cells to different stiffnesses. Our overall focus is to understand how tissue stiffness accelerates the growth of these abnormal cells and their communication with other cells during fibrosis. We believe these insights will provide important knowledge towards targeting tissue stiffness-related changes in PF.