(Medical Xpress) — Discoveries by a Yale-led team of scientists could lead the way for development of new therapies for treating fibrosis and tumor metastasis. The researchers have both uncovered a signaling pathway that promotes cell migration in certain forms of pulmonary fibrosis, a deadly lung disease, and developed a drug treatment that may block the cancer cell migration. The study appears in the Advance Online Publication of Nature Cell Biology.
Pulmonary fibrosis is the development of excessive connective tissue in the lungs. It can develop without a known cause, and produces permanent scar tissue in the lungs. There is no known cure or treatment to slow down its progress. Cell migration is the biological process by which cells move around the body, often contributing to the development or spread of diseases such as fibrosis or metastatic cancer.
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