15.09.2022"Vaccination-based immunotherapy to target profibrotic cells in liver and lung"

Chronic tissue damage activates resting fibroblasts, which usually leads to fibrosis, subsequent scarring and organ failure in the affected region. The difficulty in treating fibrosis is to specifically eliminate the activated fibroblasts while leaving the healthy, resting fibroblasts intact. Prof. Christian Stockmann's group developed a cytotoxic vaccination approach, a principle that was already established for virus-infected or cancerous cells, but now with fibrogenic cells as the target. The immunotherapy proved efficient in reducing liver and lung fibrosis in mice. This breakthrough approach has the potential to become a new therapy for patients with organ fibrosis.

The publication can be found here: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1934590922003769

More information to the topic can be found in the UZH press release.