CIRBP and acute respiratory distress syndrome: In addition, eCIRP causes sepsis-induced ALI by inducing endoplasmic reticulum (ER) stress and promoting downstream responses like apoptosis, NF-KB activation, and iNOS and pro-inflammatory cytokine production (Khan et al., 2017), while CIRP–/– mice are protected from sepsis-induced ALI (Khan et al., 2017).