Depending upon where a patient lives, idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis is a disease that currently has either very limited or no drug therapy available. A host of big pharma and big biotech firms are competing to bring the first IPF therapy to market in the U.S., but the door is wide open in Europe and Japan, too, where the only approved drug therapy addresses the condition’s symptoms but does not repair its damage or offer the potential for prevention.
The first drug approved for IPF, a progressive scarring of lung tissue of unknown origin, is InterMune Inc.’s pirfenidone,...