Fibrosis: therapeutic target or inevitable outcome?
Symposium - New York, United States
Fibrosis is a common feature of chronic organ injury and leads to progressive life-threatening diseases. Fibrotic diseases of different organs (kidney, heart, lung, and liver) represent increasingly high unmet medical need. Mechanisms currently under evaluation as anti-fibrotic therapies include targeting inflammation, growth factors, epigenetics, and collagen biogenesis. Despite experimental successes, anti-fibrotic drug development is challenging, and so far unsuccessful. This invites the questions: is fibrosis a potent contributor to disease progression or an adaptive mechanism; can the fibrotic process be stopped, or more ideally, reversed? Is prevention the key, or are alternative strategies that aim to target regenerative approaches and restore the balance between structure and function viable? Does the fibrotic process have organ specific components or we are facing a common enemy? For future success anti-fibrotic strategies will have to develop new paradigms to overcome the limitations which hinder the development of effective therapies, i.e. the prolonged natural history of the disease, the complex interaction between dynamically transforming cell populations, and the currently used endpoints which are difficult to capture within the time and economic constraints of most clinical trials. Today it is increasingly possible to discover and validate novel molecules or pathways involved in fibrogenesis by employing diverse animal models and new genetic technologies.
Organization: New York Academy of Sciences
(Courtesy of The New York Academy of Sciences, via cvent.com)
Fibrosis: therapeutic target or inevitable outcome?
Tuesday, October 22, 2013 | 8:30 AM - 4:30 PM
New York Academy of Sciences
250 Greenwich Street, 40th Floor, New York, United States
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