A time-course transcriptome analysis of a double challenge bleomycin-induced lung fibrosis rat model

Results and Conclusions: Transcriptomic analysis provided a detailed overview of BLM-induced lung fibrosis development and identified three clusters of differentially co-regulated genes whose expression was modulated in a time-dependent manner in response to BLM. One of these clusters centred on extracellular matrix-related pathways and process was found to be significantly correlated with histological parameters and gene sets derived from human IPF studies, thus indicating its translational potential as a signature biomarker for future IPF-related target validation and drug discovery studies.