Recommended Reading from Cedars-Sinai Medical Center Fellows

Idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis (IPF) is a severe disease with no cure, and a median survival rate of < 5 years (1). Other research indicates the cytokine IL-17 is part of the pro-fibrotic inflammatory response (2). The critical influence of the gut microbiome in IL-17 immune responses has been established (3), yet the role of the lung microbiota in lung inflammation, and specifically IL-17 responses that promote IPF, is overlooked. In their Immunity paper, Yang et al used the bleomycin model of fibrosis to determine if IL-17B, one of six IL-17 cytokines, caused lung fibrosis, and if the lung microbiome regulated pro-fibrotic IL-17 production.