New Treatments in ILD

Hi everyone. I'm Dr. Elizabeth Bokman, an adult rheumatologist from UCLA and I'm reporting to you live from the ACR in Orlando 2026. Yesterday I had the opportunity to moderate a session on new treatments for autoimmune interstitial lung disease and we got to hear from the perspective of a pulmonologist as well as a rheumatologist.

The new treatments that we're talking about are anti-fibrotics and specifically nintedanib or Ofev. This is a medication that was recently approved for progressive pulmonary fibrosis. Now in the study that looked at this medication, they looked at patients who had all different causes of progressive pulmonary fibrosis. In this study, 325 patients had autoimmune interstitial lung disease and treatment with nintedanib resulted in a slower decline in forced vital capacity compared with placebo.

So during this lecture we had these two esteemed doctors go through patient cases and described where they see nintedanib fitting in the paradigm of treating people with autoimmune lung disease. Now, it's important to keep in mind that we know our patients with autoimmune disease have involvement outside of the lung. So, if you're thinking about treating a patient with autoimmune lung disease, you have to think about the joints, the muscles, the skin, all of the systems that can be involved.

And so, immunomodulatory therapies like mycophenolate, rituximab, tocilizumab are still a mainstay for how we treat autoimmune interstitial lung disease. But treatments like nintedanib could be added on to improve outcomes for people who live with this condition. I'm sure we're going to see a lot more in the future on this medication and I'm really thrilled to be able to share this information with you today.