Recently, the team led by Su Jin of the State Key Laboratory of Respiratory Disease cooperated with Professor Chen Jingyu of Wuxi Municipal People’s Hospital, a renowned expert on lung transplantation and the researchers of the Fourth Military Medical University, discoveredthat the expression of DDR2 (discoidin domain receptor 2), one of the members of the collagen receptor family has risen significantly in the interstitial lung diseases for the first time . The research finding was published online by the journal ERJ Open Research in January 2018 with a title of “The pronounced high expression of discoidin domain receptor 2 in human interstitial lung diseases”.

This was another important extended task carried out after the research team led by Dr. Su Jin’s previously experiment to use animal model to prove that DDR2 was a key molecule involved in the pulmonary fibrosis pathology process (Molecular Therapy, 2016). The research has analyzed the expression level of the aforesaid six collagen receptors in the late stage of IPF and discovered that DDR2 is the only molecular marker to distinctively differentiate the normal and IPF,which was unprecedented. The discovery has laid a theoretical foundation for further using the target DDR2 strategy in the assisted diagnosis and treatment of IPF and provided clinical basis for DDR2 to become a potential molecular target for the diagnosis and treatment of pulmonary fibrosis.