Kidney disease. Heart failure. Diabetes. COVID-19. In all these conditions and more, the body’s normal healing process can run amok, leading to fibrosis, an excessive accumulation of connective tissue in inflamed organs, including the liver, lungs, pancreas, heart and other parts of the body. In the U.S., an estimated 45 percent of deaths are due to fibrosis.
But a promising potential therapy developed in collaboration with University of Wisconsin–Madison School of Pharmacy could halt fibrosis, improving outcomes for a variety of inflammatory diseases. The U.S. Patent Office recently awarded the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation (WARF) a patent for the work — the culmination of years of collaboration between Professor Glen Kwon, the Jens T. Carstensen Distinguished Chair in Pharmaceutical Sciences; senior scientist Bianca Tomasini-Johansson; and Pawel Zbyszynski (PhD ’19), a former member of the Kwon Lab, along with their collaborators in the UW School of Medicine and Public Health.