Transbronchial Lung Cryobiopsy clinical trials

Defining Optimal Settings for Transbronchial Lung Cryobiopsy II: An Ex-Vivo Human Lungs Model Study for Improvement of Specimen Quality

Diffuse parenchymal lung disease (DPLD) or Interstitial Lung Disease (ILD) comprises a broad variety of lung pathologies in which accurate diagnosis is crucial given to the different prognosis and therapeutic approaches, especially with the advent of new antifibrotic therapies. Histology is an important tool when radiologic findings, clinical manifestations and bronchoalveolar lavage analysis are inconclusive. Surgical lung biopsy (SLB) is the gold standard for tissue sampling/analysis, however there is an associated cost and risk with a mortality-related between 1.8 and 3.6% for elective cases and up to 16% for the non-elective ones. Transbronchial lung cryobiopsy (TBLC) is a safe, well-established technique used to obtain lung biopsies with large, high-quality specimens using compressed gas to freeze the tissue. The larger fragments do not contain the same crush artifacts seen in conventional transbronchial biopsies (TBB), but the non-standardization of the technique could be a limitation to the quality of the specimens and its safety. The objective of this project is to determine the optimal settings for TBLC in human lungs with ILD in order to obtain the best quality specimens with the lowest risk profile. Two previous studies using animal models evaluated the technical components, such as probe size, freezing time and probe to pleura distance that results in good quality specimens. However, these were in normal animal lungs without ILD. In this new project, multiple TBLCs will be taken from lungs of documented ILD patients undergoing lung transplantation after their removal from the recipient patient at the time of lung transplantation.