Treatable traits in interstitial lung disease: opportunities and challenges

Despite recent advances in disease-targeted pharmacotherapies for interstitial lung disease (ILD), disease progression occurs in a significant proportion of patients with consequent impact on health-related quality of life. Patients with ILD and their caregivers, clinicians, and researchers have expressed the need for more comprehensive care in ILD. The treatable traits approach is proposed as a person-centred framework for management of ILD, delivering the right treatment to the right patient at the right time, targeting distinct traits that affect health outcomes beyond the lung disease itself. These treatable traits can be subdivided into aetiological, pulmonary, extra-pulmonary, and behavioural and lifestyle domains, with multiple opportunities for treatment within each domain. In this review, we highlight opportunities to integrate the treatable traits approach into the existing ILD care throughout the patient journey, taking into account the changing treatment goals at different disease stages. We further highlight the next steps that are required to validate and further develop the treatable traits approach, with the ultimate aim to improve health outcomes for patients with ILD.