A medicine approved for idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), Nintedanib, may be good to treat other forms of lung diseases too. A new study whose findings have been recently published in the New England Journal of Medicine stipulates that more people with worse lung conditions could benefit from Nintedanib than what it has been approved for. The study also suggests that there are a number of interstitial lung diseases whose scarring mechanisms are similar even if they are caused by different things or they come in different patterns.
"Decades have been spent by scientists trying to divide various interstitial lung diseases into categories. In fact, medicine already has 200 existing categories of it depending on the cause and the patterns that they create in the lungs," said Kevin K. Brown, a professor of medicine from the National Jewish Health. As the lead author of the study, he also mentioned that "the categorization of such diseases has an impact both on the prognosis of the patient and the treatment they are to receive."
Their findings show that the progressive interstitial lung diseases (ILD) may be sharing a kind of scarring mechanism that they could respond to the same kind of treatment, if applied. "Such findings could have a profound impact on the treatment that patients with ILD are currently getting. The clinical trials as well as the basic research conducted concerning the treatment of the scarring of lung tissues as a result of the lung disease treatment are also affected by these new findings.
In 2014, Nintedanib was approved by the FDA as a treatment for idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis. It is a progressive form of interstitial lung disease whose cause remains unknown. Among the forms of ILD, it is the most common type accounting for almost 20% of all the ILD cases. There are other forms of ILDs that affect patients. The list includes but not limited to asbestosis, the scarring of the lungs due to an autoimmune disease, as well as the chronic hypersensitivity pneumonitis.
The team of researchers have recruited patients from across the nation diagnosed with a variety of progressive lung diseases. The researchers wanted to determine whether the use of Nintedanib could help slow down the progression of their diseases to reduce scarring in the lungs. There were 663 patients who participated in the INBUILD trial and they were submitted to a 52-week random treatment with either the placebo or the Nintedanib. The lung function was measured using the FVC or the forced vital capacity. A 57% decline was recorded on patients who received the medicine than those patients who only received the placebo. The researchers initially thought that patients who have been diagnosed with interstitial pneumonia would show a better response at the medication, but the laboratory results show that all patients showed a similar positive response.
While Nintedanib slowed down the decline on the lung function, it showed no significant implications nor improvement in the patient's quality of life.
"Because the effect of Nintedanib on patients suffering from various forms of scarring lung diseases are practically the same, the researchers believe that it may be used as a form of medications in small interventions," Dr. Brown said. "It gives us further insight into pulmonary diseases and treatments."
