The Fibrosis Keystone conference has been highly successful for many years, however while organs like skin, liver and lung have been covered extensively in previous meetings, other organs have received much less attention. From our conversations with peers at recent Keystone fibrosis meetings, we believe that covering a broader range of types of organ fibrosis, and hence stimulating rich, inter-organ scientific discussions would be of great interest and benefit to the fibrosis community. To this end, in addition to the ‘core’ fibroses listed above, we propose to cover fibrosis in greater depth in other organs including bone marrow, kidney, intestine and fibrosis in the context of cancer. The clinical unmet need in fibrosis is very high. Although the only approved antifibrotic therapies are currently for lung fibrosis, many new therapies for multiple types of organ fibrosis are under development. This combination of factors has resulted in fibrosis becoming one of the hottest topics in biotech and the pharmaceutical industry, with major interest both from Venture Capital and ‘Big Pharma’. Therefore, we think that a Keystone Fibrosis conference focusing on the pathogenic mechanisms driving fibrosis across a broad range of organs, coupled with sessions focused on the burgeoning area of precision therapeutics in the context of fibrosis will be of great interest to the community. The key concepts included will be:

1. Conserved and distinct mechanisms of fibrosis across multiple organs such as kidney, bone marrow, heart, intestine, liver, lung, skin, and fibrosis in the context of cancer.
2. Discussions of the modalities driving drug development in fibrosis – eg cutting-edge antibody approaches, cell and gene therapy, small molecules etc.
3. Sessions with Academic and Industry leaders discussing the state-of-the-art in antifibrotic development.
4. Sessions on the requirement for multimodal / combination therapies to tackle fibrosis.
5. Future directions / remaining open questions in fibrosis research and translation