State of the ART: Drug Screening Reveals Artesunate as a Promising Anti-Fibrosis Therapy

Abstract

Fibrosis is a progressive pathological process that severely impairs normal organ function. Current treatments for fibrosis are extremely limited, with no curative approaches available. In a recent article published in Cell, Zhang and colleagues employed drug screening using ACTA2 reporter iPSC-derived cardiac fibroblasts and identified artesunate as a potent antifibrotic drug by targeting MD2/TLR4 signaling. This study provides new insights into strategies for exploiting existing drugs to treat fibrosis.

Keywords

Fibrosis / Drug screening / Artesunate / MD2/TLR4

Acknowledgments

We thank lab members for their insightful and helpful discussions.

Author Contributions

D.J. conceived the study. Y.Q. performed a literature search and drafted the paper. Y.Q., J.L. and D.J. wrote the paper.

Ethics Statement

Not applicable.

Informed Consent Statement

Not applicable.

Funding

The work was supported in part by NIH R01-AG078655 (J.L.) and R01-HL172990 (D.J.).

Declaration of Competing Interest

The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships.

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