Reviews and prospectives of signaling pathway analysis in idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis

Idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis (IPF) is a progressive fibrosing disease with disappointing survival rate, and uneffective therapeutic progress has been made in the last few years, forcing the urgent need to improve research to this disease. The commonly accepted pathogenic hypothesis of IPF is the trigger from continuous alveolar epithelium microinjuries and in the following series events, many signaling pathways were reported to lead to abnormal tissue repair and lung structure derangement in IPF, such as TGF-β, wnt, VEGF and PI3K–Akt signaling pathways. Traditional research of IPF related signaling pathway always focus on the independent function of pathway and disease signals, but the crosstalks and interactions among them were rarely valued. In this review, we summarize the signaling pathways which were reported to play important roles in the pathologic changes of IPF and the synergistic effect among those pathways. Next we discuss the application of genomics research and bioinformatics tools on IPF related pathway analysis, and give a systems biology perspective by integrating multi-level disease related data. The novel prospective of pathway analysis could tease out the complex pathway interaction profiles of IPF, and is powerful to detect IPF related biomarkers for early diagnose and potential therapeutic targets.