Project FibroPaths®

More than 100 million individuals worldwide suffer from organ fibrosis. Fibrosis is a pathological proliferation of connective tissue in the affected organ, such as the lung, heart and liver, and there is hardly any causal treatment available. About 45 percent of all deaths can be linked to fibrosis. This trend is further enhanced by changing lifestyles, higher age, industrialization, and additional health burdens such as the Corona pandemic.

Two drugs have been approved for the treatment of pulmonary fibrosis. Apart from these, existing treatments are mainly symptomatic. This unmet medical need is partly due to the fact that the disease models available for fibrosis research are insufficient and little predictive:

• The available in-vitro and ex-vivo methods do not provide a sufficient time frame for studying fibrosis.
• The predictivity of animal experiments is insufficient for fibrosis research.
• No combination of imaging, molecular and functional parameters is available for the characterization of organ fibroses.

Fibrosis is a pathological process that develops over a long period of time. As a result, the transferability and extrapolation of nonclinical data to humans poses a problem. By providing substantial internal funds for the FibroPaths® project, Fraunhofer is addressing this issue, aiming to provide a new preclinical test system that is based on human tissue and enables testing of antifibrotic candidate drugs in the standardized and automated form of a biochip. The biochip is cryoconservable, suited for long-term culture and allows extensive structural, molecular and functional characterization of fibrotic processes.

In addition, the project will include comprehensive functional and molecular data analyses using artificial intelligence-assisted methods, and the establishment of a corresponding database.