Existing treatments pulmonary arterial hypertension (PAH) widen blood vessels, can help relieve symptoms and extend life, but cannot cure the disease or repair the damaged vessels. The field is now moving toward treatments that could actually modify the underlying disease process, based on promising laboratory research that’s being tested in patients. Two important breakthroughs include

This study focused on some of the sickest pulmonary arterial hypertension patients – those with advanced disease who were already on the best available treatments but still faced a high risk of dying within the next year. For these patients, doctors have traditionally had limited options. Researchers enrolled 172 high-risk patients who were already receiving

TPIP is a new version of an existing pulmonary arterial hypertension medication called treprostinil. It is designed as a “prodrug” – meaning it becomes active only after the body processes it. The key advantage is that TPIP can be taken as a dry powder in a capsule-based inhaler, once daily. In a 102-patient phase 2b

Prostacyclin therapies, for pulmonary arterial hypertension, especially the parenteral ones, are associated with treatment burden, risks, and high costs. Authors Karen M Olsson, Jan Fuge, Da-Hee Park,Jan C. Kamp, and Marius M. Hoeper have investigated this possibility in a small series of pulmonary arterial hypertension patients treated with sotatercept. Withdrawal of selexipag was found safe,

An article published in the New England Journal of Medicine on March 31 titled “Sotatercept in Patients with Pulmonary Arterial Hypertension at High Risk for Death” reports on the findings of ZENITH, a phase 3 trial which evaluated sotatercept as an add-on therapy for high-risk pulmonary arterial hypertension patients (functional class II-IV) already on maximum

Imatinib for pulmonary arterial hypertension was the first antiproliferative approach in this condition’s treatment and may still be relevant today despite its complicated history. Originally developed as a cancer therapy (tyrosine kinase inhibitor), it showed very good results in pulmonary arterial hypertension, creating a lot of expectation when the IMPRES study was presented at the

The authors of a study titled “Engineered pulmonary artery tissues for measuring contractility, drug testing and disease modelling”, published in the British Journal of Pharmacology on Ferbruary 20, 2025, present an innovative technique to allow proxy evaluation of human pulmonary artery contractility. Vasoreactivity of the pulmonary arteries regulates blood flow through the lungs,they say, and

An article titled “Future treatment paradigms in pulmonary arterial hypertension: a personal view from physicians, health authorities, and patients”, was published in The Lancet on February 20, 2025. It reports on discussions held between a group of international experts at the 20th Global CardioVascular Clinical Trialists Forum, CVCT (Washington DC, USA), patients’ representatives, and members