According to The Pancreas Foundation, nearly 220,000 people in the U.S. will be afflicted with acute pancreatitis.
Director of the Division of Surgical Oncology and James P. Hayes, Jr., Endowed Professor in Gastrointestinal Oncology Vikas Dudjea, MBBS, alongside the Dudeja Lab, have worked to research several potential treatments for acute pancreatitis (AP), one of which included pirfenidone.
Most recently, Dudeja Lab research was funded by a U.S. Army Medical Research Acquisition Activity (USAMRAA) grant to study pirfenidone. The grant funded their most recent research publication “Pirfenidone increases IL-10 and improves acute pancreatitis in multiple clinically relevant murine models.”
Ultimately, the team of researchers results suggested that treatment with pirfenidone in therapeutic settings– like after initiation of injury–even when administered at the peak of injury, reduces severity of local and systemic injury and inflammation in multiple models of AP.
UAB researchers included:
- Ejas Palathingal Bava
- Srikanth Iyer
- Preeti Sahay
- Tejeshwar Jain
- Prateek Sharma
- Utpreksha Vaish
- Vikas Dudeja
Before this grant, Dudeja was awarded a similar grant to study another potential treatment for pancreatitis, “Evaluation of NADPH Oxidase 1/4 Inhibition as a Novel Therapeutic Strategy Against Chronic Pancreatitis.”
“Acute pancreatitis can develop quickly and is debilitating for many,” said Dudeja. “Our lab seeks to mitigate the symptoms of this disease through potential treatments that would bring relief to our patients who experience acute pancreatitis.”
The Dudeja Lab and collaborating researchers note that next steps for researching pirfenidone as a treatment for AP look promising. In fact, pirfenidone is already FDA-approved for another disease called idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis, a trial evaluating the efficacy of pirfenidone in patients with moderate to severe AP could be initiated in the near future.