Potential biomarker found for lung disease in scleroderma patients The finding will indicate how aggressively physicians should treat patients with the associated condition. Researchers have discovered a protein that may predict disease severity for a lung condition that often proves fatal to patients with scleroderma. The recent study, published in “Despite interstitial lung disease being the leading cause of death among scleroderma patients, there are very few markers that predict progression of the disease,” said John Varga, M.D., a corresponding author of the paper, chief of the Michigan Medicine Division of Rheumatology and associate director of the U-M Scleroderma Program. “CTRP9 is an entirely novel biomarker that has never been implicated in scleroderma. It will help physicians predict the course of the disease and identify those patients who would not need to be on aggressive treatment for their lung disease.”